New biography explores Joni Mitchell’s Blue period
Monday, March 30, 2009
Five years ago writer Michelle Mercer produced a book which, at the time, seemed like mission impossible: not only writing a book on Wayne Shorter but making it into the most readable jazz biography since Alyn Shipton’s book on Dizzy Gillespie, Groovin’ High, back in 1999.
Sadly Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter was never published in the UK for commercial reasons. Now with a new publisher, Mercer has got in ahead of the long delayed book on Mitchell expected from academic Jill Halstead with a book displaying the same authorial tone and style of the Shorter book, with plenty of authorial interventions and asides but crucially with lots of input from Mitchell herself. With interest in the Canadian singer at an all-time high after the success of Herbie Hancock’s Joni album River, which won at the Grammys, and cleverly showed the versatility of the songs in the hands of a range of stylistically different singers, the book should attract keen interest especially as it is aimed at the general reader. Provocative and outspoken at times, talking points from the book are bound to include Mitchell’s assertion that she considers Coltrane’s music “overrated” and “neurotic”, although she, according to Mercer, “appreciates Coltrane’s innovation.” Her views on Wayne Shorter, are also insightful if not modest: “Wayne Shorter and I,” she says, “are both metaphorical musicians, and so is Debussy and so was Beethoven sometimes”.
Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period is published by the Free Press in April.
-- Stephen Graham