I I always drawn, sketched and painted for as long as she can remember, her painting has
taken on a new importance in her life these last few years —to the extent that her recent
canvasses are intricately interwoven with the music she has been creating. During the period
that Joni was writing and recording Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, she simultaneously worked
on a large painting which depicts in pigment some of the same themes, metaphors and
imagery of that album. “I can do songs on a square canvas,” she said later, “and I can have the
same symbolic diary in this medium as in the other.”
Conversely, Joni’s music, which is always in a state of flux, always moving forward, now
incorporates many painterly characteristics, like a Picasso canvas where everything is pared
down to the spaces in between objects, distilling the work into multi-faceted planes and the
core of meaning. What is left out is for the others to put in.
“You see, the way I write songs now,” Joni explains, “is around a standard melody that
nobody knows, because that way you can get your words to have their organic inflection so
that when you emphasize something you go up or you go down. Or if you want to put ten
syllables in a line that in the next verse is only going to have three syllables drawn out through
those bars, you have that liberty. As a result you can’t write one lead sheet and put the four
verses on it, every verse has to be written out individually—it’s all variation on a theme.”
Out in the desert, the sun casting its last golden rays on the red-rock mountains in the
distance, Joni is feeling like a free spirit, laughing, happy, enjoying the tranquility of the
landscape. The Joshua trees are flowering, ripe with juice for the first time in twenty years,
and the cacti, too, are in bloom. Joni seems in harmony, both with the elements and with
herself —flatlands, wide open spaces, being an inherent part of her and her music.
The dusdess azure of the open sky is broken only by some frail cirrus stripes which echo the
vastness of the desert floor. As she talks, Joni wanders barefoot among the chollas and the
bright yellow poppies, the wind blowing through her hair and silk shawl. Her face is radiant;
tan and sensual, at the same time showing a certain maturity which defies description because
it is emotive but touches on the primitive; a Georgia O’Keefe, earth-oriented quality.
Joni sits on a rock, looking up at the sky meditatively. “Lightning storms; how are Califor
nians going to relate to that?” she says. “They’re not an institution in your life like they are for
flatlanders, you know.” She talks with fondness about the long distances and the prairies of her
Canadian youth. That is one of the reasons why she can easily relate to the work of other
artists whose oeuvre has grown out of similar flatiand environments —artists such as O’Keefe
and Boyd Elder.
“All of a sudden I’m finding myself now in a very interesting project with Charlie Mingus.
He’s given me eight of his songs to sing and set words to, which is odd because I’ve never set
words to anyone clse’s music. He’s given me a lot of arranging—choice of musicians—he’s
given me a lot of leeway. What I’m having to learn is the rudiments of be-bop and everything,
and the odd part of it is, the timing is so perfect, it’s just natural to me. The songs are difficult
to write, but the one and a half that I’ve finished are a more natural vehicle for me to sing, in
some ways, than many of my old songs. His music is forties, early fifties, that kind of idiom —
ballads, very Billie Holidayesque except they have a lot more range than she could sing. Some
of them are about two and a half octaves —it’s a lot of notes. There’s a possibility that I might
do some things with double-basses and voice and saxophone. I want to try in some way to take
the piano and vocalist thing off of it, so that it’ll have a new sound to it. It’s such good
music—you almost gotta trick it into being modern without being gimmicky in a way, so
more people don’t just see it as a stereotype and say ‘Order me a vodka collins, it’s a girl in a
cocktail lounge.’ ”
There are six new tunes which Mingus has written for Joni, and two old ones, “Goodbye
Porkpie Hat” and another which she has to choose. He gives them to her in piano form—
there arc no titles: “I asked him what was on his mind when he wrote them. He’s dying of
cancer, and for one of them he said, ‘The things I wish I’d done and the people that I’m going
to miss’ It’s a very delicate subject matter. He’s in a wheelchair, so he can’t actually play his
part on it.”
Mingus’ first idea involved T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” He started composing a piece for
classical orchestra, bass and Spanish guitar, interspersed with readings. Where they broke in
stanzas he wanted Joni to condense it and sing it. She tried but soon gave up. “It was easier,”
she told him, “for me to condense the Bible than T.S. Eliot because you don’t want to tamper
with the beauty of his expansiveness, you can’t distill it down.” So then Mingus composed the
songs.
“Charlie’s into cacophony, mulitple melody and contrapuntal overlays,” Joni explains,
“which I mess around with too, and somehow or other he liked what I did. I got a message
through a friend and I called him up. The first time I talked to him was so warm, there was no
barrier at all. And when I got to know him and read his book I understood why. He’s a
romantic and very spiritual man —very eccentric with a big chip on his shoulder, which has
kind of devoured him all his life. It’s very bewildering, this combination, you know, but it’s
very beautiful.”