March 27, 2003 Artists, Folk to Classical, Interpret Joni Mitchell By BEN RATLIFF
After hearing hours of Joni Mitchell's music interpreted by others on Saturday, during Symphony Space's "Wall-to-Wall Joni Mitchell" festival, here's the first thing to be said about interpreting that music: It isn't easy. All those tightly sprung, shifting guitar-based harmonies, under that onrushing voice. All those lyrics, barely transportable to another person's mouth, either for reasons of rhythm or poetic expression. (There are linguistic quips, startling flashes of anger, lines that would be terribly precious coming from a duller person.) Compare it to the past 32 editions of the annual "Wall-to-Wall," a roll call of figures basic to our performance culture, from Bach to Miles Davis to Kurt Weill to George Gershwin. Joni Mitchell is indeed a major composer, worthy of the honor. But that doesn't mean many musicians dare to perform her personal, intransigent work very often. Of the stretches I managed to hear, the best performances were given by folk singers, representing where she originally came from, and jazz performers, representing where she has inevitably been heading. There wasn't much happy medium. Suzzy and Maggie Roche, two-thirds of the folk trio the Roches, have a sensible, unflappable disposition. They didn't seem overwhelmed by the task, even though Suzzy allowed that she hadn't performed a Joni Mitchell song since she was in high school. Martha Wainwright, on the other hand, was super-flappable: here's a good example of a young folk singer, a beneficiary in some sense of Ms. Mitchell's work, yet she had never performed the master's tunes and had only learned "Big Yellow Taxi" earlier that day. (Yes, it's a famous song.) Shaking with nerves and wearing rain boots on a sunny day, which could have been an indicator of her mood she got through it by playing only the basic chords and hollering out the lyrics. She forced it to work. And so did Marc Anthony Thompson, bringing two songs from "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" down to their basic essence with voice and guitar. As for jazz, the pianist Fred Hersch came prepared. His solo versions of three songs from the "Blue" album "My Old Man" (which he has recorded), "All I Want" and "River" incorporated the melodies into his own solo-piano conception, full of shifts in dynamics and a salting of Monk-style staccato figures among the rich, murmured chords. The saxophonist Greg Osby took two songs from one of Ms. Mitchell's most overlooked records, "Dog Eat Dog," and exploded the chord changes, working through them with the guitarist Mike Moreno. The Mingus Big Band performed some tracks from Ms. Mitchell's collaborative album with Charles Mingus; the baritone singer Andy Bey, escaping her vocal technique entirely, sang "A Chair in the Sky" with his own authority. Don Byron's Music for Six Musicians, with the singer D. K. Dyson, fared less well: their interpretation of an early song, "The Priest," went overboard with Yoruba references in percussion and singing, resulting in a so-so take on Ms. Mitchell by way of a so-so take on Afro-Brazilian music. And the singer Luciana Souza has a voice whose precision can match the younger Ms. Mitchell's, but the rapid rhythm of the words in "All I Want" wiggled away from her. There were cabaret singers (Julian Fleisher), classical-repertory singers (Dana Hanchard, Ute Lemper, Alicia Hall) and former quasi-rock stars (Laurie Anderson, Garland Jeffreys). One strangely memorable tribute came from the singer Theo Bleckmann, who often sings without words, and as if he's from another planet. His arrangements for voice, accordion and drums of songs from the very old "Sisotowbell Lane" to the contemporary "Borderline" were so concentrated that the performance approached a siance. Some people take their Joni seriously; Mr. Bleckmann is one of them.
