Joni immediately saw what Joellen meant, and went on to play the dulcimer some of her best-known songs, including Carey, A Case of You, All I Want, and California. She said, ‘Oh, what is that instrument?’ And I said, ‘It's a mountain dulcimer.’ She said, ‘Well, what does it sound like?’ So I played for her and I told her, I said, ‘You know, this is something that you could really get into, because it's all open tunings." “I brought it to the festival.and I saw Joni walking down the path, and I just put the dulcimer right in front of her. So, anyway, I went out into woods, looking for inspiration, and there were these beautiful red, wild columbines. And I'll sell it to either Joni Mitchell or The Incredible String Band.’ They were both my idols at the time.I told all my friends and they said yeah, yeah, yeah. “One day I found out there was going to be the Big Sur Folk Festival and I thought to myself, ‘I'll make a dulcimer and call it the Festival Model. Joellen Lapidus, who first introduced her to the dulcimer, tells the story (opens in new tab): She also recorded and performed on the Appalachian dulcimer, a 3-to-5-stringed folk instrument placed flat on the lap. Appalachian dulcimer tuning (C-G-C-G-G-C) On Hejira he recorded four separate layers of bass, combined sparingly with Joni’s two not-quite-identical guitar parts:Įxercise 2.
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It was also one of Jaco’s first experiments with overdubbing, something he would later famously apply to the live setting with a loop pedal. For Joni, it was “probably the toughest tune on the album to write”, with lyrics tackling a recent breakup with jazz-rock drummer John Guerin (.although three tracks later, Blue Motel Room muses on whether the relationship could be rekindled). The album’s title track presents a perfect balance of their distinctive sonorities. Jaco overdubbed several sublime bass parts for Joni’s 1976 album Hejira – an Arabic term she loosely transliterated from a dictionary, meaning ‘rupture’ or ‘break with the past’, and signifying the migration of Muhammad to Medina (in Joni’s words, she was searching for a term which meant ‘running away with honor’, a recurring lyrical theme throughout). They would put up a dark picket fence through my music, and I thought, why does it have to go ploddy ploddy ploddy? Finally one guy said to me, ‘Joni, you better play with jazz musicians.’” “I had tried all along to add other musicians.Nearly every bass player that I tried did the same thing.
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She describes what led to their partnership: Joni’s fascination with blending folksy melodies and nuanced jazz harmony reached its most seamless heights on her collaborations with Jaco Pastorius - an extraordinary musician, often described as ‘Hendrix of the fretless bass’. In her words, “I was a bad English student because I was good in composition, but I wasn't good in the dissection.I didn't like to break it down and analyze it in that manner.” This, of course, is absolutely no barrier to harmonic or expressive sophistication. In keeping with the initial foundations of her own approach, we’ll be treating them more like ‘color palettes’, without so much explicit focus on harmonic or intervallic analysis. So here they are, tuned with a little bluesy roughness and imperfection:īelow, we get stuck into a few of Joni’s most distinctive tunings and ideas. Joni used them as fuel for decades’ worth of multidirectional exploration – though she went far further in before long, these are the starting points in many ways. The E, D, G tunings mentioned by McDowell are, , and. They would go on to record and perform together, and remain close friends today (Joni is godmother to Eric’s daughter). She was curious about these tunings, so I showed her.”. boring, missing many musical regions she had in mind”. Andersen, who had studied the slide tunings of Muddy Waters and Mississippi Fred McDowell, recounts that Joni “hated playing guitar in standard tuning. Additionally, a serious polio episode had weakened her hands, probably making the physical ease of slacker tunings more attractive.Īs a young, unknown performer she was entranced by seeing guitarist Eric Andersen play in a Detroit nightclub.
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When she did eventually get an acoustic, she taught herself from a book by banjoist Pete Seeger, also learning old blues numbers – notably the ‘Cotten picking’ alternating bass style of Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train (opens in new tab).Įven at this early stage, she was used to switching between different instruments and string layouts (four-string ukulele, five-string banjo ideas on a six-string guitar, etc).