Soul Sativa; 7 Hours of Joni Box

The most remarkable voice in the history of pop music might belong to Joni Mitchell.  Rock, pop and folk, while surely belonging to the world of serious art, can be (very) hit and miss.  By nature, as genres (as Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno already argued about jazz in the 1940s), rock, pop and folk are not always designed to provide beauty or insight; especially rock and pop are often equally (if not more) designed to sell.  Indeed, because musicianship is often as untrained as trained, rock, pop and folk often have as much to do with their poetry -- the words -- as their music.  One can be in dangerous territory there; what happens when one has bad music and bad words?

It's a grab bag; it can be quite difficult to know who to take seriously stylistically, expressionistically and poetically in the troubador genre.  Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan have always been taken dead seriously; later in their careers, they have been showered with honors from Presidential Medals of Freedom to PEN Awards.  As writers, spokespeople and expressionists, one gets it; cliché or not, they found words that spoke to generations and hit on topical issues.  Figures like Cohen, Dylan -- maybe Springsteen in his own way -- sought to, and in the end did, speak for others. Mitchell's journey was always more personal; it was a woman in man's world.  It was a woman who exhibited strength, yet always wanted one thing; perhaps two:  love and belonging.  Joni sang about the torsion of such emotions, as well as the fairy tale dreams they could bring.  Though she also wrote about topical issues -- the environment in "Big Yellow Taxi," for example (from 1970's Ladies of the Canyon ["they paved paradise and put up a parking lot," wrote Joni]) -- heartbreak, its ironies and the meaning of a woman's freedom were Mitchell's real territory.  She sought to lead no revolution.  Joni made little philosophy.  She made a good deal of psychology, though.

What set Joni apart -- though she was in fact an excellent lyricist ("You turn me on, I'm a radio," wrote Joni on 1972's For the Roses; genius) -- was that she was twice, three times, maybe four, the musician of most her contemporaries.  The closest to Mitchell's harmonic sensibilities at that time (or anytime since) might have been Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young; the adventure into jazz chords, the sound of held suspensions, the sensibility for delayed resolutions and the realization that music can play out over several octaves, and not just one or two.  Unlike CSN, however (and sometimes Y [Mitchell had a relationship with N, incidentally), Joni sang alone.  Mitchell offered one woman's voice with an accompaniment of a full palette of fretted sounds, exploring the full range of the guitar she brought with her.

All of it -- the voice, the funky tunings -- produced remarkable results.  Rhino records -- the label with a penchant for classic retro -- has produced a box set of Mitchell's ten studio albums from 1968-1979.  Drop the needle on the first track and you're immediately in the whole situation.  Just a few bars into "I Had a King" from 1968's Songs to a Seagull, you've been hit with that clear-- perhaps clearer -- than-a-bell tone and Mitchell's broad, folk-expressionistic background.  The '70s saw other great women singers  -- Carole King, Carly Simon, Ricky Lee Jones; queens, undoubtedly.  The distinction was the über-ridiculous purity of Joni's tone and her ear for absolutely endlessly expansive harmonies.  There are pitfalls on those tens studio albums between '68 and '79:  the droning sound of "Tin Angel" from '69's Clouds and the drum-circle, half-spoken word feel of "Dreamland" from '77's Don Juan's Restless Daughter are examples.  Joni Mitchell could misstep.  But by far -- by far -- the better part of those ten albums hits you with moments of unique beauty difficult to find by any musician in any genre, trained, not trained, semi-trained or anywhere in between.  On early albums, because Mitchell was a good guitarist, she accompanied herself well -- gorgeously, often.  Pairing her voice with lush fusion sounds on later albums like Court and Spark (1974) and Hejira (1976) -- and unique masters like Jaco Pastorius -- made for heart stoppingly beautiful and gently funky, artful moments.  The opening bars of Court and Spark's "Help Me," Hejira's "Furry Sings the Blues" or  Mingus' (1979) "The Wolf that Lives in Lindsey" do nothing short of bringing all else to a halt; tonally, they make a guaranteed freeze of time and space and crystallize every thought you have. 1971's Blue -- still in the (mostly) self-accompaniment phase -- is a folk tour-de-force.  It is the work of a unique artist who poses herself as nothing but a woman, looking deeply inside her soul, laying it utterly, totally and beautifully bare for everyone -- everyone -- to see.

Mitchell's career continued after 1979, of course -- though a bit more sporadically.  Her range, as it does for most singers -- especially those puffing on a good half pack of fags a day -- dropped.  She found a lower, slightly bluesier register, working extremely well on powerful records like Turbulent Indigo (1994).  This was a sound previewed ever so slightly on Mingus, available on this box set.  In any case, what Joni and Rhino have done with this collection is give us the rock/pop/folk equivalent of pure oxygen, the cleanest mountain air or maybe a bowl of bodaciously righteous Jack Herer. 7 hours of it.  It's a beautiful and rare collection with which you can spend days, an entire weekend or just save for the moments in life that contain the absolute most meaning for you, or those around you.  I know I will. (10/10)