I was (briefly) in college in 1992. My best friend was a very talented drummer name Mike. We played in a jazz group together called, for no apparent reason, the Pre-Flattened Cats.
One day I was in Mike’s room, high up in one of the dorm towers, sitting on the windowsill and looking out over the sunlit fields that ringed our small state school in northern New York. Mike said, “I’m going to put on a record for you and you’re either going to fall in love with it or never like it.” And he started “Coyote,” the first track on Joni Mitchell’s 1976 masterpiece Hejira. Given that I just referred to it as a masterpiece, you can probably guess which side of his challenge I fell on.
I was already a fan of big band jazz, and I’d started to get more into small-group jazz, largely under Mike’s tutelage. He also introduced me to people like Roky Erickson & the 13th Floor Elevators and The Band. Joni Mitchell was a new name to me, but I could instantly hear in Hejira a blend of the folk, rock and improvised musics that were the hallmark of that phase of her career.
When it came to recruiting personnel, Mitchell didn’t mess around. Hejira features a cast of jazz heavyweights, including guitarist Larry Carlton, clarinetist Abe Most, trumpeter Chuck Findley, saxophonist Tom Scott, vibraphonist Victor Feldman, and bassist Jaco Pastorius. A quick game of “jazz family tree” shows you how connected these players are to the jazz pantheon: (more…)
To be honest, I had my doubts about Day Two of Folk Festival 50. First of all, I was still tired from the day one. Next, it appeared that the lineup wasn’t quite as strong as it was on Saturday, and yet it was hard to deny that there were some compelling artists scheduled. The weather was also a bit iffy, with rain and thunderstorms predicted for the afternoon.
