“Mingus,” by Joni Mitchell

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.).

The Mingus album ended a bout of writer’s block Mitchell had suffered for the previous year and was a suitable comma at the end of her 1970’s stanza. The album also ended Mitchell’s period of overtly jazzy studio albums, as the 1980’s and 1990’s would find her trying out rock-and-roll, synthesizers, adult-oriented pop, and returning to acoustic guitar basics. Mingus is full of unfinished fragments, unexpected musical turns, and mystery. Mitchell writes in her liner notes for the album, “Charles Mingus, a musical mystic, died in Mexico, January 5, 1979, at the age of 56. He was cremated the next day. The same day 56 sperm whales beached themselves on the Mexican coastline and were removed by fire.  These are the coincidences that thrill my imagination.” Thrilling, indeed.

“The Magazine,” by Rickie Lee Jones

Rickie Lee Jones was the talk of the town when her debut album exploded onto the scene in 1979, and deservedly so. Her 1981 follow-up album, Pirates, was equally strong and much heralded upon its initial release, even boasting a “Chuck E.’s In Love” caliber single, "Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking," which was criminally-ignored by top 40 radio (that, apparently, much preferred the featherweight rubbish of “I Love A Rainy Night” and “9 to 5” to Jones’ smart pop masterworks), and sadly, the exceptional album, while reaching number 5 on the album charts and achieving “gold” status solely on the momentum of Jones’ popular debut, faded quickly into obscurity after just a few months. It remains a long-forgotten pop gem.

And Jones spent the remainder of 1981 and most of 1982 touring to promote Pirates while struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. By 1983, after a lack of “hit” singles from Pirates and fearing the fickle, record-buying public might forget about Jones altogether, Warner Brothers put out a “mini-album,” Girl At Her Volcano, in 1983, which featured covers of pop standards as well as a few live tracks and leftover outtakes from earlier album sessions. And to be honest, the scrapped-together album was actually quite good, still holding up 30 years later: a testament to Jones’ remarkable gifts. Moving to France for the remainder of that year, Jones kicked her addictions and got back to writing new songs for the next album, 1984’s sublime and regrettably overlooked, The Magazine.

Co-written and co-produced with James Newton Howard, who had previously worked on Elton John’s late 1970’s/early 1980’s albums and who would go on to broad acclaim composing film scores (e.g., The Prince Of Tides, The Sixth Sense, The Hunger Games, etc.), the sweeping concept of this album, at times, sounds like a movie score: a movie score to a quirky, personal, joyful, and sometimes painful movie - kind of like how life is. This stands to reason, as Jones has said that each album she records is like the soundtrack of her life during the time she’s making it. And while the lyrics may be a bit opaque at times, and the whimsical narratives may lead to a few dead ends, the catchy songs (“Gravity,” “Juke Box Fury,” “It Must Be Love,” and the single, “The Real End,” which landed on the lower end of the Hot 100 charts) and the pretty musical interludes (“Prelude To Gravity,” and the mysterious, moody “Rorschachs”) hang together well, shifting moods throughout and keeping the project wholly engaging.

This great album, too, was lost on pop radio that summer and fall, losing ground to the synthesized blips and beeps of horrid earworms, like the squeaky, “Break My Stride,” or the song that was popular solely because Michael Jackson sang on it and anything he touched that year was going to sell a million copies, “Somebody’s Watching Me,” and possibly the worst pop song ever, particularly because it hailed from one of pop music’s former geniuses, “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” And while the album was certainly of a piece with film scores of the day, pop fans that year were far more interested in throwaway blockbuster movie themes, like the cheesy, fight-for-your-right-to-dance-and-have-teenage-sex call to arms, “Footloose,” and the just plain stupid, “Ghostbusters.” But all of this is to say that overlooking Rickie Lee Jones in 1984 was a mistake, plain and simple, as so many missed out on this sumptuous, imaginative, playful, and tender album.

And bonus points for The Magazine for cajoling me into a making a brave leap early in my career. As a new professional in the mid-1990s, I suddenly found myself in the middle of an organization that I no longer recognized. A number of us were disoriented and discouraged, reeling from new leadership. I no longer felt welcome in a workplace that suddenly seemed unfriendly and unfamiliar. To stay would have been a discouraging chain of professional disappointments, but the thought of leaving was paralyzing. While practically intolerable, it felt safer, somehow, to just hang out, albeit unhappily. But the last refrain of Jones’, “Runaround,” haunted and seduced me that year: “Take a deep breath and break the chain, uh-oh, ooh-oh; take a deep breath and break the chain, uh-oh, ooh-oh; take a deep breath and break the chain…” And so I did, and I’ve never looked back. And that, my gentle readers, is the life changing power of music.

Rickie Lee Jones, by Rickie Lee Jones

In the words of the inimitable John Lennon, “the 70’s were a drag, man.” The decade began with the ongoing debacle that was the Vietnam War, student shootings at Kent State, the escalating “Cold War” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and “Watergate,” the first televised U.S. Presidential transgression (not counting this one). And the decade clumsily fumbled forward, not ending any better than it had begun, with a major U.S. economic recession, panicky lines at gas stations, a U.S. hostage situation in Iran, and, as a strategic move in the aforementioned “Cold War,” the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan.

In fact, much North American popular culture of the day reflected the overarching malaise that accompanied the close of that turbulent decade, from the maudlin theme music of popular television shows, like this one, to the bummed-out storylines for top films of the era. Even top 40 radio got up on the wrong side of the bed in the latter part of the decade with downer themes, like “Heart of Glass,” “I Will Survive,” and the deliciously-depressing, “Dust In The Wind.”

But suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, Rickie Lee Jones sauntered through the side door with a cool and inspired sorta jazz when she walked onto the Saturday Night Live music stage in the spring of 1979 and won America’s heart, singing her #4 pop hit, “Chuck E’s In Love.” That surprisingly spry, little hit record, nestled next to bleak pop songs and nervously edgy disco sounds that dominated the radio then, playfully hinted at a spirit of hope that inevitably accompanies the dawn of a new decade (Again, said John Lennon: “It can’t get no worse”).

And Rickie Lee Jones self-titled debut was the quintessential album for that moment in U.S. History, perfectly describing the sadness of the nation, mingled with childlike excitement for the new decade ahead. When music fans hit the stores to pick up the LP that spring and summer, they discovered an album that accurately reflected their frustration and disappointment, but that also gave them permission to smile again. Featuring an all-star cast of musicians, including Dr. John, Michael McDonald, Randy Newman, and Tom Scott, who provided the stupendous horns, vis-a’-vis Joni Mitchell’s sublime, Court and Spark five years earlier. Rickie Lee Jones debut is a jazzy, pop savvy, funky, little joint.

Jones seasoned her debut with sassy, swinging sucker-licks, like “Young Blood,” “Danny’s All-Star Joint,” and “Weasel and The White Boys Cool,” which provide perfect moments of levity, while, “Night Train,” the might-have-been hit single, paints an impressionist portrait of bohemian life, where eight balls, dark alleys, and riding the city train fills the days and nights of young turks, carving out recognizable niches for themselves in unfamiliar territory. The album, itself, is of a piece, perfectly describing the coming-of-age process in the big city, where the sidewalk ahead holds more doubts than opportunities, and the only thing to which the young musician can cling is to her memories and to her burgeoning talent.

While having its share of cheerful moments, the album remains, overall, a morose affair. The melancholy, “On Saturday Afternoons In 1963,” finds the twenty-something Jones waxing nostalgic about childhood spent laughing the afternoons away and reflecting on the treasure of old friends. The album closes with two somber songs: the aching melancholy of “Company,” a devastating breakup song, and the achingly lonely “After Hours (Twelve Bars Past Midnight),” where the singer sits alone at the piano, literally closing down the lonely bar, tiredly flipping down the light switch as she says “goodnight” to the ravaged decade and hails a cab home.