Search - Joni Mitchell - Collectors Edition on DVD

Excellent 2003 video biography and fun 1998 concert

Sanpete | in Utah | 12/27/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"For me the treasure here is the biography produced for the PBS series American Masters, Woman of Heart and Mind. It's fairly comprehensive, with photos and videos from every stage of her life and career (up to 2003), including the story of her childhood polio, early love for painting (when music was a secondary love), the beginnings of her performing career in Alberta, the birth of her daughter, marriages, lovers, musical companions, Laurel Canyon, New York, her changes in musical direction, and thoughts on all these things from her, friends, associates and music critics. Participants include David Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Tom Rush, Eric Andersen, David Geffen, and many more.

The documentary proper is 92 minutes, presented in anamorphic widescreen, and there are also nine bonus "sound bites," interview pieces with Mitchell a minute or two long, organized by subject. The video and sound quality varies with the source material, of course, but is generally just fine. (There are four bonus performances on the disc, all taken from the concert on the other disc in this set.)

I'm in the crowd that was and still is enraptured by Mitchell's early music. It's still incredible that anyone could sing as she did, and her music was a perfect match for her voice. In the documentary there is generous use of video recordings of early performances. There's some attention to her unusual guitar style, self-taught, and to her unusual chords in particular. David Crosby called them Martian; she called them "chords of inquiry," because they have a question mark, corresponding to her unresolved feelings; she searched for chords that felt like she felt.

And how she felt, as she points out, was an essential part of her music that has changed over the years. When she was young she was depressed and vulnerable. She calls her depression the sand for the pearl, and remarks that when the (creative) demons leave, the angels do too. She doesn't mean by this that she's no longer musically creative, but it's evident that the exceptional emotional intensity of her early music isn't there in the same way in the later music. Along with physical changes, in her voice from smoking and age, and in her hands from lingering effects of the polio (she has said elsewhere that it now hurts to play acoustic guitar), this explains some of the changes in her music over the years. Even though my heart is especially with the early work, I enjoy her more recent music too, and can hardly begrudge her not staying depressed and vulnerable or changing in other ways.

It's actually one of the enjoyable things about her 1998 concert video also included in this set that she seems relaxed and is having fun. The concert is in the round, in a small space with living-room style seating, and Mitchell's paintings on the walls. She recalls as a child a teacher told her that if she could paint with pictures she could paint with words. Here she combines Painting with Words and Music. She's (improbably) painting on one of her framed pieces when the concert begins, and she rushes to the stage to play and tell stories. Close-ups of paintings are occasionally shown during the concert.

The musical pieces range through her career, and also include a doo-wop ("Why Do Fools Fall in Love?") and a Marvin Gaye song ("Trouble Man"--she makes no mention of a connection to her own "Trouble Child"). (The complete playlist: "Tiger Bones" (instrumental over which she introduces the concept of the concert), "Big Yellow Taxi," "Just Like This Train," "Night Ride Home," "Crazy Cries of Love," "Harry's House," "Black Crow," "Amelia," "Hejira," "Sex Kills," "The Magdelene Laundries," "Moon at the Window," "Face Lift," "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?," "Trouble Man," "Nothing Can Be Done," "Song for Sharon," "Woodstock," "Dream Land.")

By 1998 Mitchell's voice had become smokier (so to speak), so it's breathier than in younger days, and it breaks a little in the high range. The musicality is intact. She's joined by some fine jazz-leaning musicians/friends, including former husband Larry Klein on bass, Mark Isham on trumpet, Brian Blade on drums, and Greg Leisz on pedal steel. She plays electric guitar. It's a friendly atmosphere; when she once forgets the words, she asks the audience, and someone shouts them so she can continue. She dances, she jokes, she banters. She shows some skill as a mimic and storyteller, doing her take on Bob Dylan during "Big Yellow Taxi" and, in a longish story, doing an older woman she encountered in a resort when she had thought she was by herself. It's fun because of the way she tells it.

The sound quality for the concert is good, to my ears; the video is a little soft but OK. 97 minutes for the concert, plus a brief introduction by the producer. Full screen format.

The bio disc is sold separately here, and the concert disc here."