One summer many years ago when I was still single, two
married friends of mine started inviting me to spend time with them: a lot of
time. We usually had a great time: sharing delicious food and laughter: a lot
of laughter. What I was slow to realize was that their marriage was ending, and
I had served as a temporary balm for their pain that summer: a friendly face to
provide respite from endless fights, frazzled emotions, and the agony of a marriage
falling apart. I share this story because I picked up Joni Mitchell’s Mingus album that summer, at the height
of our evenings together, and the music on Mingus
perfectly captured the emotion of that summer: joyful, peculiar, fragile, sad, disjointed,
raw, and fragmented, like a tentative conversation or an unfinished painting.
Mingus was Joni
Mitchell’s tenth studio album and the result of legendary jazz bassist, Charles
Mingus, contacting Mitchell through shared acquaintances. According to
Mitchell’s website, Mingus “…had been introduced to her music by a friend of a
friend. Mingus thought Mitchell was a gutsy artist with a sense of adventure,
and he wanted Joni to consider working with him on an adaption of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets…Joni thought the idea was
quite original, but after reading Eliot's work, she nixed the project, saying
that she'd much rather condense the Bible. A few weeks later, Mingus called and
told her he'd written six melodies especially for her, and he wanted her to
write lyrics to the tunes he'd named Joni
I-VI."
Mitchell states that at their first meeting, Mingus’ face
“…shone up at me with a joyous mischief. I liked him immediately. I had come to
New York to hear six new songs he had written for me. I was honored! I was
curious! It was as if I had been standing by a river – one toe in the water –
feeling it out – an Charlie came by and pushed me in – ‘sink or swim’ – him
laughing at me dog paddling around in the currents of Black classical music.”
The process of musical collaboration is fascinating to me.
It’s no doubt a painstaking combination of inspiration and compromise. In the
early days, Lennon and McCartney composed together, eyeball to eyeball. Taupin
sent lyrics by mail to John, who composed melodies and sent them back to the
author for review. And composer friends have told me that when they write,
they’re never quite sure when to call a song “finished.” They fuss over a
lyric, a chord change, or they completely scrap an idea and start over.
Composers make choices, but sometimes circumstances create a condition where
choices are made for them, like in the instance of a looming deadline.
Decisions have to be made. The work has to be completed and turned-in.
And for this album, time was of essence, as Mingus’ health was
quickly deteriorating in 1978, as he was immobilized from amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and Mitchell worked earnestly, composing words
to Mingus’ melodies, hoping to complete them while he could hear the end
results. “Time never ticked so loudly for me as it did this last year,” stated
Mitchell. “I wanted Charlie to witness the project’s completion.” And Mitchell
almost succeeded, playing for Mingus all but one finished song, the exuberant,
“God Must Be A Boogie Man,” which was based upon his autobiography and was a
song Mitchell suggested Mingus would have found hilarious.
Featuring only six songs (plus five tape recorded
conversations with Mingus, or “raps” to provide filler) and only three of the
melodies Mingus provided to Mitchell, as the other three songs on Mingus, including, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”
and “The Wolf That Lives In Lindsay,” are older compositions by Mingus (to
which Mitchell wrote new lyrics) and Mitchell, respectively. “God Must Be ABoogie Man” was composed by Mitchell and inspired by the first few pages of
Mingus’ autobiography. It was long rumored that Mitchell’s experimentations
with the other two new Mingus melodies were put down on tape, but deemed
insufficient for the final release. Those recordings, reported either “lost” or
“destroyed,” began surfacing online and remain rare collectibles for fans of
both Mingus and Mitchell.
The experimental album contains just over 30 minutes of
actual music. Mitchell calls the songs on Mingus,
“audio paintings,” claiming, at the album’s release, to be satisfied with the
final product (as well she should have been). On this album, more than any
other of Mitchell’s previous, jazz-informed work, she used her voice like an
instrument itself, blending her scatting with horns, bass, spare acoustic
guitar, keyboards, cymbals and snares. Mingus
received dismal reviews upon release, and even over time it seems to be one of
Mitchell’s least appreciated albums, with Pitchfork
even referring to the groundbreaking artist as, ”jazz dilatant.”
But I find Mingus enigmatic
and enduring and return to it often, with my own “Mingus: Expanded Edition” compiled in Spotify, including Mingus’
original instrumental, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as well as other Mitchell tunes
reminiscent of the era and of the album’s mood (“Jericho” and “Overture/Cotton
Avenue,” from Don Juan’s RecklessDaughter). I also can’t help but also recognize the time capsule that was
the album, as un-commercial as it may have been, it was not completely a fish
out of water in the late 70’s pop music landscape, as it reflected the musical
zeitgeist of a major musical movement in 1979: jazzy, R&B-inflected pop
music (e.g., Boz Skaggs, Earth, Wind, & Fire, Rickie Lee Jones, Chuck
Mangione, Gerry Rafferty, etc.).
