The two Duke Ellington songs Joni Mitchell loved the most: “The spiritual synchronisation”

Posted On January 11, 2025January 11, 2025

While she was primarily regarded as a folk artist, Joni Mitchell has a long-standing and highly-publicised love for jazz music. Having written an album alongside Charles Mingus in his final years and also recruited the talents of fusion bass player Jaco Pastorius to perform on most of her records in the late 1970s, she even enjoyed more than just an association with the genre; she was arguably a facilitator of its expansion and development for parts of her career.

Mitchell has waxed lyrical about numerous jazz musicians who helped shape her career and influenced her stylistic changes in the past and regularly speaks about her jazz heroes in an eloquent, poetic and learned fashion. Sure, just as many folk musicians have served a great deal of inspiration to the singer-songwriter’s artistic growth since she began releasing music in the 1960s, but her connection with jazz is such an important one to note.

When she first began to show signs of a shift towards adding elements of jazz to her music on her 1974 album Court and Spark, she spoke to Rolling Stone about her decision to begin incorporating these outside influences into her pre-established folk sound. “You have two options,” she told the publication. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So, of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”

Around this time, jazz was experiencing something of a changing of the guard among its ranks of high-profile players, and while the likes of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock were still performing and mutating their sound in an effort to further expand the horizons of the genre, many of the greats that had enjoyed the majority of their success in the 1940s and ‘50s were either retiring from music or had passed away. One such icon who died in the same year as Mitchell released this career-changing record was Duke Ellington, an artist who had served as a major inspiration to the Canadian musician.

The American pianist was famed for leading his jazz orchestra from the 1920s until his death. He is still widely regarded as one of the most groundbreaking players of his generation because of how he fused jazz with big band arrangements. This novel approach and fusion of styles invite comparisons with the work of Mitchell, who fused together jazz and folk on numerous albums in a fashion that few had attempted before her.

In the liner notes for Mitchell’s 2005 entry into the Artist’s Choice compilation series, Mitchell spoke about the two songs by Duke Ellington & His Orchestra that were included in the tracklist for the release – ‘Subtle Lament’ and ‘Jeep’s Blues’. Speaking about the former, Mitchell praised the various elements of the arrangement that piqued her interest in the track. “It’s the sound of the band, the warmth of it, the heart, the humour, the spiritual synchronisation, that makes this music so inimitable.” She would go on to claim that Ellington’s notes on the piano come “tickling in” and that they “wink at you” – a truly delightful way to perceive and interpret the emergence of a particular sound.

With regards to ‘Jeep’s Blues’, she spoke less about the performances on the track but instead shared an anecdote about how she struck up a conversation with a waiter in her local bistro during her time in Toronto and discovered the album this song was taken from. “I was about to do an album of standards and had not completed the set list, so it was great for research,” she explained. “I struck up a dialogue with a waiter there, and before I left town, he presented me with a hard-to-find Duke Ellington live recording, Hot Summer Dance, and on it was this cut.”

While her selections on Artist’s Choice included other jazz artists such as Billie Holiday and Etta James, the way she talks about Ellington’s work is so passionate, and her love for him in particular is palpable from reading her short excerpts on the tracks.

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