Not sure if these have been posted or catalogued as yet, but here
they are anyway.
>From 'TIMES ON LINE'' November 22nd.
With everyone from Robbie Williams to Rod Stewart recording
albums of jazz standards, it takes Joni Mitchell, the grande dame
of the Woodstock generation, to show what can really be achieved
when pop takes on the orchestral formula.
Travelogue (Nonesuch/eastwest) is an ambitious, double-CD
collection in which Mitchell reworks 22 of her old songs into an
orchestral tour de force. Accompanied by a 70-piece orchestra, a
20-voice choir and star band, she transforms numbers such as For
the Roses and Slouching Towards Bethlehem into sombre slabs of
melodrama, while coaxing a contrastingly relaxed swing out of
other songs such as Be Cool and Hejira.
>From THE TELEGRAPH - The arts column:
Joni bows out, integrity intact
(Filed: 20/11/2002)
Rupert Christiansen sings the praises of a real artist who has
stayed true to herself and never sold out
I have been listening passionately to Joni Mitchell for over 30
years now, and it's sad to think that her new album, Travelogue,
released next week, may well be her last. The great Canadian
troubadour is 59 this month, and the legacy of childhood polio,
as well as decades of chain-smoking, have taken their toll.
She rarely appears live nowadays, and publicly knocks the
brutalities of the rock-and-roll machine with an abandon which
suggests that she counts herself out of the loop, if not the
competition.
More significantly, she believes she has written pretty much all
she wants to write and that she was never destined for music
anyway - "I'm a painter who got sidetracked," she asserted in a
recent interview.
To dramatise this claim, the cover of her 1995 album Turbulent
Indigo is a parody of a Van Gogh self-portrait, with her own face
substituted for Vincent's.
Her detractors sneer at such folie de grandeur, and there's no
doubt that Joni has a high opinion of herself. (Nietzsche is
among her favourite authors.) She can be hoity-toity with those
she despises, and has unhesitatingly scorned the ersatz
chanteuses, from Madonna downwards, who have attempted to pay her
pathetic tribute.
You can understand her irritation - her jealousy even. Joni has
not sold out. Joni is not manufactured. "Show my tits? Grab my
crotch? It's not my world," she roared, when asked why she was
thinking of bowing out. Yes, Joni can call herself an artist -
she's been true to herself rather than the market, and paid the
price for her integrity.
Travelogue is a fitting farewell to a wonderful career. Like her
previous album, Both Sides Now, it's retrospective. As her former
husband and constant collaborator Larry Klein explains in a
sleeve note, this is "not a 'Greatest Hits with Orchestra' type
of record".
It aims higher than that, reinterpreting a range of her songs
through a voice that has gravitated from reedy soprano to warm
contralto and a sensibility that has moved from its roots in folk
and beatnik culture, via jazz, world music and fusion, to end up
in the warm embrace of symphonic wind, strings and brass.
The tracks include reworkings of The Circle Game and Woodstock,
two of the few songs of hers that have made any inroad on the
charts. I still prefer them in their simpler original 1970 form
on Ladies of the Canyon; there they have an emotional spontaneity
that the older Joni has lost, and now you feel that she's just
doodling over them.
Other songs from the earlier albums - Blue, For the Roses, Court
and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira - are more
coherently jazzed up, with shorter phrases, sharper syncopation
and more subtle colouring.
I've always had trouble with Joni's work after the watershed of
her late Seventies collaboration with Charlie Mingus. Under his
sway, she started meandering melodically, and the poetic
awkwardness that creeps into some of the lyrics in The Hissing of
Summer Lawns ("Like a priest with a pornographic watch/Looking
and longing on the sly") can turn into outright pretentiousness.
But in Turbulent Indigo (1995) she recovered much of her old edgy
grace, and her revision of that album's highlights, The Sire of
Sorrows and Sex Kills, show her at her incomparable best - a
bittersweet poet of human relationships and "the petty wars/That
shell-shock love away", as well as a witty and forceful critic of
the dreams and excesses of modern America. Is there a more
haunting evocation of the heady evil of drug culture than Cold
Blue Steel and Sweet Fire, or a more poignant riff on the vanity
of worldly success than Free Man in Paris?
Joni's influence has been profound. I'm not thinking just of her
obvious impact on pop-song writers such as Elvis Costello, Beth
Orton or P J Harvey, but on the wider musical world, too. The
best of our younger composers, Mark-Anthony Turnage, has explored
Joni's post-Mingus oeuvre and appreciates its virtues far more
than I do; and America's two greatest classical divas, Renee
Fleming and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, have both told me that she
was the inspiration of their youth.
As I sit in the recital hall and opera house, I often find myself
wishing that more aspiring classical singers could come out of
their boxes and learn from the freedom, colour and expressivity
of Joni Mitchell's artistry.
>From Independent
Album: Joni Mitchell
Travelogue (Nonesuch/Eastwest)
15 November 2002
Retaining the arranger/conductor Vince Mendoza from her standards
album Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell has re-recorded 22 of her old
songs in new orchestral settings on this double-CD, in some cases
transforming them entirely, although the contributions of saxist
Wayne Shorter, in particular, provide a bridge to her earlier
work. Despite its cool, sophisticated manner - try and imagine
Steely Dan orchestrated by Leonard Bernstein - Travelogue is not
a dinner-party album - it demands far too much of one's attention
to languish discreetly in the background. The arrangements here
are a far cry from the usual pallid tints and shades of
orchestral pop: these are highly wrought, meticulously considered
orchestrations in which each line - each word - is paid
microscopically close attention, the subtleties of meaning in her
lyrics reflected in an ever-changing flow of instrumental accents
and details which can, in the more extreme cases, obscure the
songs they serve. But mostly, the new settings open out the
songs, accentuating the urban noir shadings of "Trouble Child",
lending a darkly dramatic tone to the dystopian "Sex Kills", and
generally illuminating the enduring intelligence and
sophistication of Mitchell's writing throughout her career.
