Expect songs from 'Blue' as well as 'Hissing of Summer Lawns.'
A masterful lyricist, composer and painter, Joni Mitchell is an inimitable creative force. She’s racked up eight Grammys, has her name in stars on sidewalks and gets honorary doctorate degrees and lifetime achievement awards. She is also a chain-smoking, media-wary introvert with a serious case of stage fright. These seemingly disparate facets, however, serve only to strengthen the allure of Mitchell, whose musical contributions are held up with those of Dylan and the Beatles. Her catalog is immense and varied and she has won the loyalties of countless die-hard fans who understand that with Joni, the artist cannot be separated from the art.
“She’s the complete package,” says local singer-songwriter Jayme Kelly Curtis. “She’s a fully-realized artist in every way. She has a facility of the language, she’s a guitar innovator, she’s an arranger, and she’s the artist responsible for the visual look of her output.”
A longtime fan, Curtis is bringing together some of Santa Cruz’s finest musical talents for a celebration of Mitchell’s life called The Joni Show. Featuring Barry and Shelley Phillips, Ginny Mitchell, Mary McCaslin, Jesse Autumn, Nancy LeVan, Bill Walker, Amy Obenski and many more, the Joni Show pays loving tribute to the legend and her music. Altogether, 19 artist will be performing songs that span much of Mitchell’s career, from her 1968 debut Song to a Seagull through her mid-1990s release Turbulent Indigo.
“Everybody who is in the show has had a serious love affair with Joni Mitchell at some point in their lives,” says Curtis. “I’m thrilled about the range of material that got chosen. There are six songs from Blue, which didn’t surprise me at all, but there are also 16 other songs that run the gamut.”
Hits such as “Chelsea Morning,” “Woodstock,” “Help Me” and “I Wish I Had A River” are represented (by Celina Guttierez, the Phillipses and Autumn, Mitchell and Obenski respectively), but so are some of Mitchell’s lesser-known works. McCaslin is performing “Nathan La Franeer,” Guttierez is doing “Magdalene Laundries,” Curtis is singing “For The Roses” and Paula Bliss, Bob Bliss and Daniel Vee Lewis are taking on “Trouble Child.”
“For a while, I had to be a Joni Mitchell apologist,” says Curtis. “I’d say, ‘She’s just so far beyond where you’re at right now.’ It took a long time for the world to catch up to the fact that her music is really jazz music.”
As Mitchell steered away from pop music and moved further into the realm of jazz, she expanded the public notion of what popular music could be. Well known for her inventive guitar tunings, textured and complex song structures and lyrical openness, Mitchell changed the face of music. Her work with jazz innovators Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus further stretched her musical range and solidified her status as a compositional master whose work exists outside of any pre-existing genre.
“A lot of the songs that she’s really well known for don’t really represent the body of her work,” says Curtis, whose first experience of Mitchell’s music was through headphones, with the album open in her lap, reading along to the lyrics. “It put me in another dimension,” she says. “You were entering her world and it was a magical kingdom. You can have [Mitchell’s music] on in the background, but if you want to get into it, you have to get into it.”
Though her ventures into uncharted musical territory were not always met enthusiastically at first—albums such as The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira were dismissed at the time of their release—Mitchell now stands in the living legend category. Taken as a whole her body of work follows the arc of a generation. Innocence, optimism, love, pain, tragedy and hope are all present in her music, and her fans return to her poetic insights again and again.
“This woman has touched me and so many other people so deeply,” says Curtis. “Her lyrics really resonate in a universal way. She has the ability to express not just what’s in her own heart, but she really speaks for a generation. There’s a Joni Mitchell lyric for everything.”
The Joni Show
Saturday, March 3, 8pm
Tickets $20 adv/$25 door
