Joni Mitchell: What a Wonderful Surprise at Newport

Joni Mitchell at Newport

What a wonderful surprise that Joni Mitchell gave us at the Newport Folk Festival Sunday evening. 

For the first time since 1969, the revered Canadian singer/songwriter returned to Rhode Island with her voice and electric guitar at the ready and played a historic set to close this year’s festival. It was her first full-length public concert in about two decades.

Credit goes to singer Brandi Carlisle for bringing Mitchell and her popular music back to the performance stage. The Fort Adams crowd was filled with elation as the 78-year-old legend gave new meaning to many of her iconic songs such as “Both Sides Now,” “Help Me,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “A Case of You,” and “Both Sides Now.”

As Mitchell sat in a Louis XIV-style chair on the festival stage – likened by many as a throne – wearing a beret, a grey-toned satin pants ensemble and decked with glittering beads and sunglasses, she began her set with a group sing-a-long to “Carey,” one of the chestnuts from her 1971 album Blue, regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time. The group included Carlisle and Wynonna Judd. 

Later, Mitchell’s set included “Amelia,” about Amelia Earhart, which she penned for her jazz-inspired 1976 album Hejira as well as a long, electric guitar solo interlude on the 1974 tune “Just Like This Train” from Court and Spark that reminded everyone of her keen sense of jazz phrasing. Despite having gone through health struggles in recent years, recovering from a 2015 brain aneurysm that required her to re-learn how to talk and walk, the elder Mitchell looked in good spirits on this evening – surrounded by friends – and her 13-song set showed her strength of will is second to none.

Looking back, one of my set favorites was Mitchell’s lower-register interpretation of the Gershwin classic “Summertime,” from the 1935 opera Porgy & Bess. The husky sound of Mitchell’s voice brought to mind that of Nina Simone, another wonderful interpreter of the Gershwin aria. Listening with great interest, there was a determination that couldn’t be denied in the sound of Mitchell’s voice in this classic tune.

Mitchell’s set ended with “The Circle Game,” which she performed more than half a century ago in Newport.

“After all she’s been through, she returned to the Newport Folk Fest stage after 53 years and I will never forget sitting next to her while she stopped this old world for a while,” Carlisle, who sang backup for Mitchell, wrote on Twitter.

Indeed, Mitchell has looked at life from both sides and, now, she’s come full circle in this one memorable evening.

Mitchell’s memorable set list included: “Carey,” “Come In From the Cold,” “Help Me,” “Case of You,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Just Like This Train,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” “Amelia,” “Love Potion #9,” “Shine,” “Summertime,” “Both Sides Now,” and “The Circle Game.”

On Sunday, Mitchell’s eternal songs echoed with a sense pride and joy spread that transcended across generations. Long may she live – and may her songs continue to shine brightly among the music canon.

Cover photo: Courtesy of Newport Folk Festival YouTube video.

Videos: Courtesy of YouTube.

Joni Mitchell at 71: Always attending to her imagination

Joni Mitchell / Self portrait of a true original 

Last weekend, I read with great interest an online interview with the singer-songwriter-artist Joni Mitchell in Maclean's, the Canadian national weekly current affairs magazine. In it, she confessed: "I don't watch news. I'm not a fish so I don't want to get caught in the net so I'm not on the web. I only use my iPhone as a camera, I don't even know my number."

Interviews with Mitchell are rare. However, the Canadian-born Mitchell has surfaced from her Los Angeles residence to drum interest in her latest project, a box set called Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, a Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced. Released this week, it combines her career as a Grammy-winning musician with being a painter and a dance enthusiast in collecting 53 songs from her 40 years of recording. Mitchell curated the collection, designed the package which includes six new paintings, and wrote an autobiographical text illuminating her recording process.

I've been fond of Mitchell's music going way back to my university days as a student at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota and as a disc jockey for the college's WMCN-FM radio station. While I have an appreciation for Mitchell's folk music roots -- her 1970 album Blue is a must-listen -- I've always been attracted to her jazzy side, which surfaced in 1974 with Court and Spark and a year later with The Hissing of Summer Lawns, my two favorite Joni Mitchell albums.

During her Maclean's interview with the writer Elio Iannacci, the 71-year-old Mitchell referred to the younger generation as the "push-button generation of today." She was asked: "What is impairing us the most?" She answered matter-of-factly: "Everything is about channel changing. It has ruined attention spans. I spaced out in school but I didn't develop attention-deficit issues because I placed attention on my imagination and ignored the curriculum," said Mitchell.

"I didn't have a million news feeds to contend with. It is just like when I have people to my house to watch a film -- it's like living in a Robert Altman movie! They are always talking over each other. We are all losing the plot. It's an addiction to phones and too much information."

Speaking of an addiction to our phones -- and, by extension, to too much information -- in last Saturday's The New York Times, contributing writer Timothy Egan hit upon a theme of digital narcissism in his opinion article "Grand Tour of the Self." He wrote: "Technology, when it shrinks the globe, or makes life less burdensome, or provides easier access to knowledge, is a wonderful thing. The smartphone has dramatically changed the world, mostly for the better. The jet aircraft opened far reaches of the planet to average people. And the selfie stick, as a simple device to take a better portrait, is largely harmless.

"But when technology changes the travel experience itself -- from immersion and surprise to documentary one-upmanship -- it defeats the point of the journey. We travel to freshen senses dulled by routine. We travel for discovery and reinvention."

Thanks to the popularity of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, we've allowed everyone to become the star of their own movie in their "twenty-teens." Additionally, foodies have become obsessive about photographing what they eat -- especially when dining out -- and posting it online for instant gratification.

Maybe, we have become victims of "nature deficit disorder," so called because in the words of Egan, it's "a symptom of being connected to everything, while being unable to connect to anything."

Which brings us back to Joni Mitchell and the repercussions that future generations face now that everyone spends so much time on their smartphones. She told Maclean's: "My grandson and I were sailing on a boat and he said, 'It's boring.' I asked, 'How can you say it's boring? The sun is shining, we're going across the water so fast...' And he said, 'Not fast enough.' Technology has given him this appetite."

Fortunately, spending half of each year in the province of British Columbia enables Mitchell an opportunity to escape American culture and step away from the "star-making machinery behind the popular song" while returning to her Canadian roots. "I just drop off in the bush. My life has been somewhat overstimulated so I'll never get bored.

"I don't belong to this modern world and I'm out of it, but I don't want in."

Joni Mitchell self-portrait courtesy of jonimitchell.com.

Clouds: Appreciating the theater of the sky

"I've looked at clouds from both sides now / 
From up and down, and still somehow"

Bows and flows of angel hair,
And ice cream castles in the air,
And feather canyons everywhere,
I've looked at clouds that way.

But now they only block the sun,
They rain and snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done,
But clouds got in my way.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.
From up and down, and still somehow,
It's clouds illusions I recall.
I really don't know clouds at all.
~ From "Both Sides, Now" by Joni Mitchell, Clouds (1969).

Clouds / thinking Joni Mitchell

March has been a rainy month throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Good news for the trees, plants and flowers, of course. Not so great for getting outside to work in the garden. But, it doesn't come as any great surprise since the winter months are when it rains most in northern California.  When it hasn't been wet, often, the skies above me have been filled with clouds.  Even a partly-sunny day is bound to have clouds.  When I think of clouds suspended in the Earth's atmosphere above me, I am reminded of the classic 1969 Joni Mitchell album, Clouds.

Clouds and their formations are fascinating to observe. They are grouped into three physical categories: cirri form, cumuli form or convective, and strati form.  However, I'm not here to give a science lecture.  Instead, to me, clouds are democratic ~ they come in all shapes and sizes ~ and while some appear puffy like huge expansive cotton balls, others look pretty darn threatening and ready to burst at any moment.

Clouds / puffy, democratic

During daylight hours, I can stand on our deck, face east and, simply, look up in the sky.  Oh, and be rewarded, too, with a theater in the sky. Sometimes, I can see an airplane in the distant flying into the clouds, wondering what its destination might be.

Like an artist applying a paintbrush to a canvas, the clouds overhead create an atmospheric illusion, a chimera in the sky. Never content with staying in one place too long, they glide effortlessly across the Bay Area sky, usually from my left to right ~ north to south ~ as I look up at them while facing eastward.  Of course, it's best when the clouds overhead don't appear too threatening.

There's a simple reward in observing clouds.  For me, it's found in making the time ~ and having the patience ~ to appreciate their beauty.  And, if I have my camera at the ready, all the better.

"It's clouds illusions I recall / I really don't know clouds at all."

Photographs by Michael Dickens, copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
Video of Joni Mitchell singing "Both Sides, Now" courtesy of YouTube.