Anna Siciliano
Joni’s Jazz
By Joni Mitchell
Rhino Entertainment. 4 hr 45 min. $59.98
Rosarita
By Anita Desai
Scribner. 112 pp. $20.00
Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock perform at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, CA, September 1978.
In the early eighties, Joni Mitchell wrote a wordless tune in a Hollywood recording studio. It would be seven years before she found the lyrics for it, nine before she released it, and thirty-eight before she put out the original recording. A new demo of the song, “Two Gray Rooms” (which was the final track in Mitchell’s 1991 album, Night Ride Home), is included in a new box set titled Joni’s Jazz. The anthology brings renewed attention to this music icon’s long career.
The “Two Gray Rooms” demo opens with a piano prelude that recalls the drone of elevator music. Mitchell’s voice then breaks through the warble, clear as dawn, singing an undulating, wordless melody. Beneath her gentle humming, a lonely agony tugs at you. As I listened I wondered how, even without words, Mitchell could imbue her song with such feeling.
In the final version from Night Ride Home, the lyrics change how “Two Grey Rooms” unfolds. The same piano prelude opens the song, but instead of humming, Mitchell climbs up an octave with the words “tomorrow is Sunday,” ending on a scratchy vibrato. The next line is more restrained. “Now there’s only one day left to go,” she sighs, perfectly heartbroken. The strength of Mitchell’s voice is subdued in this second line, her lyrics softening to a whisper. The recording in Night Ride Home is the “Two Grey Rooms” that I grew up with, hearing the familiar tune play in the living room on winter mornings. But the original demo reveals a rawer kind of creativity. It exposes an unusually vulnerable underside of Mitchell’s songwriting that digs into the core of the song.
I had always known Mitchell for her emotive lyrics, which I first encountered in my parent’s CD copy of Blue (1971). That album takes the listener through a clear narrative arc in which Mitchell explores the tension between the pursuit of art and freedom and her longing for domestic stability. Listening to Joni’s Jazz was uncomfortable, like sifting through dry sand, each heap taking me back to a moment in Mitchell’s career. No matter how I pressed these pieces together, they crumbled. They refused to lump into a coherent shape in the way that Blue does.
As it happens, I was reading Anita Desai’s recent novel, Rosarita (2024), at around the same time. Desai throws her reader into the mysterious circumstances that ensnare Bonita, a woman grieving the loss of her mother. As with Joni’s Jazz, I was eager to extract meaning from this book, to be told exactly what Desai thought about grief and motherhood. But, despite my frustration, Desai would not relent. In a particularly haunting scene, Bonita reminisces about a childhood painting that used to hang above her bed. She wonders how her sense of the painting would change if her mother had painted it. What if she had come up with the “wishy-washy pale pastels… of a woman seated… with a child playing in the sand at her feet”? This passage is memorable not for its description of Bonita’s inner conflict, but for its uncanny evocation of the mother-daughter relationship. Desai doesn’t analyze the painting. She doesn’t explain how it redefines Bonita’s grief or perception of her mother. Things are left incomplete, wanting in closure.
When in search of her mother’s art school, Bonita feels comforted by the presence of a stranger who sings as she walks down the aisle of the bus Bonita rides. Sleepy travellers wake to extract coins from their pockets, depositing them into the stranger’s beret. She disembarks as quickly as she gets on, disappearing down an invisible path. The appearance of this singing woman, like many scenes in Rosarita, goes unexplained. Why did she appear just to suddenly vanish? Did this random encounter signal a new wave of sadness for Bonita, or did it indicate a glimpse of joy amid her grief? Unwilling to leave us with a comfortable resolution, Desai merely lets the bus trundle on.
The book invites its readers to linger in unresolved, fleeting moments like this. Joni’s Jazz does the same. A certain disharmony is inherent to any large compilation of an artist’s work, and Mitchell’s latest album pulls her listener in close, inviting us intimately into her creative process. The album spans five decades of songwriting: from older songs like “Marcie” (1969) to a live version of “Summertime,” from the 2023 Newport Folk Festival. More than just a boxed set, it is a celebration of Mitchell’s artistry.
When I first listened to it, I was surprised that it began with “Blue”—not her jazziest song, despite the title of the anthology. Nonetheless, listen closely and you will hear influences from Miles Davis' muted trumpet solo in his song "Kind Of Blue," which Mitchell claims informed her short vocal intro. This remastered version of “Blue” reveals Mitchell’s extensive music literacy, but also how her compositions transcend generic boundaries. Despite her collaborations with jazz greats such as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Charles Mingus, Mitchell assembles her music like a pop artist—superimposing layers of voice-centric harmonies with funky instrumental arrangements. The remaster of “Comes Love,” for example, begins with a muted trumpet before Mitchell’s voice comes in, and an orchestra folds in more levels of brassy instrumentation. She transitions between blaring big-band phrases to stripped-back vocal sections that bring to mind her more traditional folk songs. Joni’s Jazz captures Mitchell in a vulnerable exploration of style; listening to it can only be described as an intimate experience.
One would expect the contemporary output of experienced artists like Mitchell or Desai to be something as conceptually unified as their earlier works. But at eighty-two and eighty-eight, respectively, these women seem more concerned with ambiguity. As they look back on their lives’ work, they seem to feel no anxiety about fixing its meaning. Instead, they let it exist in a state of possibility.
The value of Joni’s Jazz is that it documents the development of Mitchell’s cross-genre style—a unique combination of jazz and folk—and is a window into her creative process. As for Desai, Rosarita may be her last book. But it sheds light on how we should read her work: not in search of definitive meaning, but with an openness to being moved by life’s unexplained, and inexplicable, moments of grief and of passion. Desai and Mitchell stretch their creativity, letting it take its own shape, complete in its formlessness.
Anna Siciliano is writing something in the margins.