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The World of Joni Mitchell
Gould Center Undergraduate Seminar for Academic Year 2008-09
ID 196 CM
Fall 2008
Roberts North #105, Claremont McKenna College
Tuesdays, 2:45 - 5:30 p.m.
This course will explore the range of musical and cultural influences that informed and influenced Joni Mitchell, not only as one of the most important singer-songwriters in the history of the genre, but as a composer, a painter, a poet, and a key traveler through the highs and lows of American culture from the 1960s onward. We will examine how Joni Mitchell discovered what she called her “Chords of inquiry” in over 80 different open guitar tunings; how she came to define the Woodstock generation by writing a song about a concert she never attended; and how, with her words and music, she was only matched by her two fellow “Pace Runners” Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. We will also analyze, with precise scrutiny, what it was about Miles Davis’s use of space that captivated her so, and how and why the saxophonist-composer Wayne Shorter became her ideal collaborator on a dozen albums. We will spend time contemplating her collaboration with the great bassist-composer Charles Mingus and her complex musical dialogues with the innovative fretless bass player Jaco Pastorius. In addition, we will consider her relationship to her musical influences (Ellington, Debussy, Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, Miles, Steely Dan, and so on) and the relationship to her life as a self-described “lonely painter” and her visually informed musical and lyrical palette. On the cusp of a new musicological study of her work by Chip Whitesell, we will attempt to reconcile how musicological modes of analysis can be applied to an artist who works intuitively, with almost no technical knowledge, disregarding names for chords that match the complexity of those by Wayne Shorter and other seminal jazz composers. We will also analyze and interpret her uncanny and inimitable use of words, drawn less from poetic influences than visual stimuli, especially film, painting, and her own pictoral imagination. We will also examine the philosophical and theological texts that informed her music and mind, including those of Nietzsche and Merton, and key passages from The Bible and the Upanishads. The class will not require technical knowledge of music, but will require an open mind and a keen intuition in the spirit of Mitchell’s own emotive muse.
David Yaffe, CMC Visiting Assistant Professor in Literature for AY 2008-09 and the instructor for this course, is widely known a jazz and popular music scholar, having authored numerous articles on these and other subjects for such publications as the Boston Globe, The Nation, New Republic, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and The Village Voice. Harold Bloom called Yaffe's Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (Princeton University Press, 2006) "a marvelously evocative celebration of the interrelationships between modern American writing and jazz, which is in itself the outstanding American contribution to the arts, at least since Walt Whitman." Cornel West called the same book "a fascinating and formidable response to Ralph Ellison's famous call for a 'jazz-shaped' reading of American literature. Yaffe's bold and often brilliant treatments of black-Jewish relations in twentieth-century U.S. culture, Ellison's own seminal works, poetry and jazz influences, and the autobiographies of Mingus, Holiday, and Miles Davis are major contributions to American and Afro-American studies." Yaffe's The Many Roads of Bob Dylan will be published soon by Yale University Press. He is currently working on a biography, tentatively titled Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (under contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux), based in part on conversations with the artist.
Joni Mitchell
Born in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, Joni Mitchell began singing at the age of nine. As a teenager in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, she taught herself to play the ukulele and the guitar, and began busking on the streets of Saskatoon and performing in local coffeehouses. After a brief turn at the local art college, Mitchell moved to Toronto and, in 1967, to New York City, where she began her career as a solo artist and where her songs caught the fancy of several folksingers and country artists, including Tom Rush, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Judy Collins, and George Hamilton IV. Steady touring along the east coast led to production of her debut album, Song to a Seagull, in 1968, and, in 1969, her landmark second album, Clouds (featuring such songs as “The Angel,” “Both Sides Now,” and “Chelsea Morning”), which garnered a Grammy Award for Best Folk Performance. Further critical and commercial success attended the release of her albums Ladies of the Canyon (1970), Blue (1971), For the Roses (1972), Court and Spark (1974), and her two-disc concert album, Miles of Aisles (1974), which included tracks of her performances at the Berkeley Community Center and the L.A. Music Center.
In the mid- to late-1970s, Mitchell’s experimentations in other forms (documented in her albums The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and Mingus—commissioned by jazz bassist-composer-bandleader Charles Mingus) and her participation in the Rolling Thunder Revue tours (with, among others, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan) marked her as one of the most innovative, important, influential, versatile, and distinctive musical artists of her generation. The legion of musicians who claim to have been inspired by Mitchell includes Annie Lenox, Elvis Costello, James Taylor, Björk, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, Jimmy Page, Prince, Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall, Tori Amos, Amy Grant, George Michael, Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, Kanye West, Mac Dre, Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, and Herbie Hancock (Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters (2007), an album paying tribute to Mitchell's work, includes contributions by Cohen, Jones, Turner, and Mitchell herself).
Joni Mitchell’s multitudinous awards and honors include her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, her ten Grammy Awards (including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement citation given in 2002), an honorary doctorate in music from McGill University, and an appointment as a Companion of the Order of Canada (joining Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen as only the third popular Canadian singer/songwriter to receive Canada’s highest civilian honor).
Mitchell is also an accomplished painter whose works have been exhibited throughout the United States and Canada.
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