From Laurel Canyon to jazz-rockโ€™s far outposts โ€“ the suffragette of sensualityโ€™s stunning first decadeโ€ฆ

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Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female artist in music history. While there have undoubtedly been more impressive singers, from Billie Holiday to Aretha Franklin to Dusty Springfield, prior to Mitchellโ€™s emergence female performers were largely restricted to interpretive roles. Even the formidably talented Carole King had to wait until the โ€™70s for significant success as a singer-songwriter with Tapestry.

But Mitchellโ€™s wider influence is undeniable, with artists far removed from her initial folk-music scene acknowledging her impact โ€“ Prince, famously, is a huge fan, and Madonna has admitted that โ€œof all the women Iโ€™ve heard, she had the most profound effect on me from a lyrical point of viewโ€. Not to mention, one imagines, Mitchellโ€™s presentation of herself as a sexually self-determining woman at a time when submissive acquiescence was the dominant mode afforded newly โ€œliberatedโ€ women; nor her capacity to negotiate some of the most complex and unvarnished emotional analyses ever set to music. Joni Mitchell was a true emancipator, a suffragette of sensuality blessed with a heightened poetic sensibility.

There is no better evocation of the dawn of a new, more questing consciousness than Joniโ€™s early albums: the very album title Ladies Of The Canyon is redolent of flaxen-haired damsels in Angeleno hippie paradise. Mitchell had been discovered by David Crosby, who became the first of her Laurel Canyon lovers. As producer of her debut album Songs To A Seagull, Crosbyโ€™s main aim was to capture her talent as clearly as possible, unencumbered by overweening arrangements. โ€œI didnโ€™t do a very good job producing it,โ€ Crosby once told me modestly, โ€œbut she did make an astounding record.โ€

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The opening track โ€œI Came To The Cityโ€ deals with her early marriage, as if opening the album with a line drawn under her previous life. As such, it presages the strain of confessional honesty that runs throughout her work. Couched in imagery of pirates and seabirds, gems, flowers and fabrics, the rest of the album expresses her driving need for freedom, especially from the anchoring restraints of would-be suitors keen to pin her down. Heard retrospectively, the cold detail of the songs, and the austere purity of her voice, speak volumes about her clear-eyed ambition.

Studded with the early classics โ€œChelsea Morningโ€ and โ€œBoth Sides Nowโ€, Clouds is suffused with romantic uncertainty, hope and betrayal, like a ledger of the emotional accounting of the free-love era, profit and loss measured not just in love, but in the restraints and expectations love places upon us: the older woman โ€œleft to winter hereโ€ in โ€œThe Galleryโ€ and the hesitant steps into new territory taken in โ€œTin Angelโ€ and โ€œI Donโ€™t Know Where I Standโ€. Ladies Of The Canyon added โ€œBig Yellow Taxiโ€œ, โ€œWoodstockโ€ and โ€œThe Circle Gameโ€ to her burgeoning canon of classics, while โ€œWillyโ€ โ€“ lover Graham Nashโ€™s nickname โ€“ became one of the earliest examples of the new mode of autobiographical revelation that turned Laurel Canyon scenestersโ€™ songs into diaristic soap operas. But Blue was the landmark album, the apotheosis of Joniโ€™s early style in which her lyrical strategies, melodies and vocal approaches were handled with a compelling confidence, and sequenced with an intelligent regard for what might be called the albumโ€™s emotional topography. Even today, there is no better evocation of the light-hearted joy of romance than โ€œCareyโ€, with its see-sawing melody, and a delivery that slips so easily between affectionate yearning and bubbly excitement.

The same themes sustained through For The Roses in the fretful self-absorption of โ€œWoman Of Heart And Mindโ€ and โ€œLesson In Survivalโ€, while both โ€œYou Turn Me On Iโ€™m A Radioโ€ and โ€œBlonde In The Bleachersโ€ dealt head-on with the difficulties of sustaining relationships between musicians. But it was Tom Scottโ€™s reeds that offered the clearest indicator of how Mitchellโ€™s music would develop through the โ€™70s. The fuller arrangements of Court And Spark, with their jazz-inflected horns, have the effect of freeing up the songs: the material is just as romantically themed as before, just as anxious about appearances and social graces, but the general mood is lighter and less insular: the backing vocals, flute and Larry Carltonโ€™s guitar give a mousse-light soul mood to a song like โ€œHelp Meโ€, while the jazz-pop texture of โ€œCar On A Hillโ€ offers an early blueprint of the sophisticated sound for which Steely Dan were searching at the time.

With Carlton, vibraphonist Victor Feldman and the Danโ€™s Jeff โ€˜Skunkโ€™ Baxter involved, that sound came even closer on The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, perhaps Mitchellโ€™s greatest accomplishment. The arrangements this time incorporated bass flute, flugelhorn, and miasmic electric piano, with โ€œThe Jungle Lineโ€ offered the most dynamic expression of the albumโ€™s overall theme tracking the thin veneer, between the primitive and the sophisticated. The albumโ€™s protagonists live in gated communities like prisons (โ€œHe gave her a room full of Chippendale that nobody sits inโ€), disguise themselves in the โ€œstolen clothesโ€ of long-gone movie icons, and engage in the courtly rounds of โ€œThe Boho Danceโ€, pointedly contrasted with the reminiscence of a furtive but free youthhood of romance and rockโ€™nโ€™roll in โ€œIn France They Kiss On Main Streetโ€.

Besides Larry Carlton, bassist Jaco Pastorius had the biggest impact on Mitchellโ€™s late-โ€™70s sound, his floating fretless tones and deft harmonics at their most sensuous on the lovely โ€œCoyoteโ€ from Hejira, an album about her constant search for love and music, depicted as a flight from both boredom and the anchorages of partnership and marriage. Accordingly, the songs are missives from a variety of locales (New York, LA, Memphis, Savannah), a succession of hotel rooms, and a string of lovers โ€“ literally, in the closing trackโ€™s title, โ€œThe Refuge Of The Roadsโ€.

Unfortunately, Joniโ€™s Jazz Odyssey leads her into less agreeable territory on the double-album Don Juanโ€™s Reckless Daughter and Mingus, the tribute album of songs co-written with the late Charles Mingus. On the former, Pastoriusโ€™s bass becomes deeply irritating, evoking the supercilious self-satisfaction of โ€™70s jazz-rock, while the side-long semi-improvised jazz symphony โ€œPaprika Plainsโ€ is one of the least appealing items in Mitchellโ€™s catalogue. One canโ€™t help thinking that Tim Buckley blended folk and jazz so much more guilelessly, and infinitely more enjoyably, ten years before.

Sadly, Mingus finds her more deeply embroiled with such as Pastorius, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, pursuing the etiolated, lifelessly academic jazz style of the era. Her description of the pieces as โ€œaudio paintingsโ€ exactly fingers the problem: I donโ€™t want audio paintings from a great songwriter, I want songs. Is there something wrong with that?

Andy Gill