(Credits: Alamy)
Mon 12 January 2026 5:00, UK
There was a certain stripe of musician that Joni Mitchell was always looking for whenever she made one of her records.
She could have easily made some of the greatest music of her career with only her and an acoustic guitar, but after dominating the singer-songwriter scene, there were far greater things for her to explore. Being stagnant was never an option for her when making a new record, but when looking through her career, there were a few years where she couldn’t have asked for more from her musicians.
Because throughout her career, Mitchell wanted to challenge herself whenever making her new records. Some records may have hit a sour note with fans like Dog Eat Dog, but there was never a single moment where she didn’t have a clear idea of what she wanted her music to sound like. And when the popsphere didn’t give her enough satisfaction, it was time for her to move on to the world of jazz.
Her open tunings had already given her the opportunity to improvise, but she didn’t want to be the female counterpart to Crosby, Stills, and Nash. She felt that her contemporaries were people like Miles Davis, and if she wanted to bring some of her more abstract songs to life, she was going to need the greatest musicians that she could have asked for. And the result was the kind of roster that a band like Steely Dan would have killed to have when making some of their masterpieces.
It’s one thing to be able to collaborate with some of the greatest rock musicians in the world, but across albums like Hejira, she was already working with the greatest session musicians in the world. Jaco Pastorius was practically the Jimi Hendrix of the bass guitar whenever he performed, and when listening to the performances on Miles of Aisles, hearing Larry Carlton perfectly complement everything she was playing felt like putting that one extra sonic touch to some of her classics.
But if she was going to make an album entitled after jazz great Charles Mingus, no one walking in that studio was there to half-ass anything. Everyone was a veteran of the scene, and even if the collaborations with someone like John McLaughlin didn’t see the light of day on record, having a lineup like Pastorius, Mingus, Mitchell, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter on the same track feels almost too good for words.
And looking back on her career, Mitchell had no problem calling that record one of the best bands that she had ever been in, saying, “That band that was my favorite band of Miles’s with the exception — Ron Carter was replaced by Jaco Pastorius. So I got to play, you know, it’s all live. I got to play with a band — my favorite band in the world, right? It’s the only jazz — everyone accuses me — my music is not jazz. But it is — jazz is one of the tributaries that makes up my music and I borrowed some things from it, but any jazzer will tell you, no, I’m not in the idiom.”
Then again, you could have fooled the average listener when listening to this record. No one in their right mind would have been able to hold their own next to legends like Hancock, but Mitchell was never looking to be in competition with any of them. She wanted to make sure that she had the best emotional translators whenever she made her records, and you can hear every member on the record listening to every line she plays and respond to it in just the right way.
So while there might have been artists that Mitchell had tons of fun playing with, the best bands in the world weren’t the ones only having fun making records. It was those who could listen to the song and play exactly what was needed for the tune when that red light came on in the studio.
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