Joni Mitchell

Item: Travelogue
Author: Steve Stockman

Travelogue

(2002)

Reviewed by Steve Stockman

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Label Nonesuch RecordsThe Phantom Tollbooth2003

folk jazz

Just one week in November. Three double albums by three of the legends of rock. Paul McCartney's Back in the US may not be getting a UK release until March next year but by the wonder of the Internet it hardly matters to fans when an album sits on a shelf. If it is out, it is out! All three albums have similarities and marked contrasts. Ex-Beatle and Dylan both released a live document, but McCartney's is from the recently highly acclaimed US tour where the roadies just arrived home whereas the roadies for Dylan's release are probably long dead, the tapes of that particular tour being some twenty seven years old. Mitchell, like the other two, sings nothing we haven't heard or bought before. Her take, though, is a complete reinvention; her classics done in the studio with a fully blown orchestra.

All three are reinventions. Mitchell in that sense exceeds all the demands. The raison d'etre was reinvention. Dylan has always been reinventing, making an already huge catalogue even more immense by so restructuring words and melodies that songs can sound nothing like the original, if within the Dylan art form there can ever be such a thing as an original. His live shows are so much more intriguing, if occasionally shambolic, as a result. With McCartney you feel for the poor band who has to play Beatle parts, too sacred to be too finger loose and fancy free, resigned in faithful reproduction to never to be a substitute for John, George and Ringo.

Interpreting the pre rock 'n' roll classics was no new idea when Joni Mitchell took the classics of the last century's first half and orchestrated them into an intriguing work. Most intriguing were her own compositions that sat in the collection, "A Case Of You" and "Both Sides Now." Even more intriguing, she has followed it up with an album of orchestrated covers of her own songs. Orchestrated covers of songs like "Amelia," "Woodstock," "Cherokee Louise" or "Hejira" didn't sound like a good idea, but now that it is done it is a revelation. Musical director Larry Klein has brought together an orchestra and jazz players to give his ex-wife's work new resonance and drama in the most tasteful and subtle of ways.

What is most revealing is to hear thirty years of someone's work in the same musical contextualization. Yes, the Dylan and McCartney albums are live recordings with the same band covering entire careers, but because all the songs are rejuvenated to the same level on this Mitchell experiment gives everything a new perspective. Mitchell's voice is the center of attention at all times in this vast array of players and that voice seems deeper than her original Baez-like wail, not just from the abuse cigarettes and but also the wisdom of maturity.

The packaging is immaculate. There have always been album covers of Joni's painting and portraits have been very regular in recent releases but inside the outer box there is a book between the CDs in the digipack where we get her paintings complemented by quotations from her songs. Getting the opportunity to read her visual images alongside her poetic ones is a highly intoxicating mix. A live concert with her projected behind would be some experience. We get a taste of it in the multi media bonus material here. The booklet is all wrapped in quotes from "Love," her musical paraphrase of I Corinthians 13, her paraphrase of Yeats' "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and a few other snippets of "Refuge of the Roads," "Amelia" and the spiritually drenched "Woodstock" and "The Circle Game." Mitchell has confessed to having been in a "born again phase" when she wrote "Woodstock" and this album is an intriguing way to ask has her work ever since been a travelogue "back to the garden" that she called us to in that song?

What we need to keep going back to here is that voice and that poetry that make this a near musical drama which could only be bettered if she now brought it alive in the theatres of the world. The Opera House in Belfast awaits you, Joni!