Howdy, y'all! Saw Klein's name come up in the last few days and was prompted to give him a five minute google browse tonight. Found a short interview of Larry that contained a little Joni story I hadn't heard before.....thought I'd share.
Penny NP: Goodbye Blue Sky - Joni and James Galway Here's the link for the whole interview from June 2002. http://mixonline.com/ar/audio_larry_klein_doing/ The relationship you have with Joni Mitchell is very provocative and highly personal. What would you say you've learned from it? Through the records I've worked on with her, I think she kind of groomed me. I had to be slapped around a little bit, in respect to certain ways I dealt with her toward the beginning of our creative collaborations. I had to acquire a sense of syntax, how to say things that aren't critical, demeaning and dismissive. Also, knowing when to say something is such an important thing in the creative process. You have to stay aware of the spirit in a room and not hammer down someone's enthusiasm when it's in a delicate state. Also, realizing that there's an element of mystery and serendipity involved with making records; it's not always a rational and linear process. All these things she helped a lot with me learning, and some of them I had to learn the hard way. What are you currently doing with Joni? I'm preparing all the music for a two-record set of her songs that we're recontextualizing for orchestra. It's sort of a retrospective examination of her works, through up to her now 18th record. It'll be looking back through all this work she's done with orchestra and 10 different instrumental groups. The goal is to make people more aware of the compositional innovations she's done through her career. It'll be a lot of music, 24 songs. We'll be tracking it in London with the orchestra and finish it in the studio here [Santa Monica, Calif.], adding Wayne Shorter as the featured soloist. I'll also be working with Vince Mendoza. He's a very talented orchestrator/arranger and composer in his own right, and we've teamed up for about four other projects previously. What's the craziest Joni Mitchell story you tell can me without her getting mad? She's always had a serendipitous, mystical sense of timing, which has always astounded me. There was one incident where we were working on a song we'd written together for a record of hers. At a certain point, she wanted to go down the street to this American Indian antique convention at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. I said, ?Oh no, you can't go down there. You'll be there for hours and we're on the clock here.? Then all of sudden, BOOM! Lightning struck somewhere around the studio and the power went out. So everything had to be reset, and there were some problems with the console. So she said, ?Okay, I'm going down to the Indian event.? I started dreading that she would be there for hours, but almost about the same time that we got everything up and running, she returned. With her was an Indian movie actor, Iron Eyes Cody, who had been in all these John Wayne movies and other westerns. So we ended up incorporating him chanting over this song [?Lakota,? from Chalkmark in a Rain Storm ], which ended up working out really well. But it was this chain of weird, synchronystic, serendipitous events that led to her coming back with this Indian chief. Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/
