Customer Reviews

Both Sides Now

5 star:		(109)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

Like many other Joni Mitchell fans I wondered for many yearswhy she didn't record a mainstream jazz album. You only had to listento her singing well-known vocalese classics like "Twisted" on the "Court and Spark" album, or "Centrepiece" on "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" to know that she had the timing, range, and style to tackle it. Now she has come out with the answer. And it is excellent. Forget small intimate jazz groups - she's spun off in yet another direction (what else from such a varied artiste) and given us full-blown orchestral arrangements of these songs, none of which is new for this album. All but two are standards, and the exceptions are old Mitchell favourites. (...) every song has been chosen and put in a specific order to sketch the profile of a love affair. This is made quite clear in the album notes themselves. From the eager start ("You're My Thrill") via infatuation ("Comes Love"), disaffection ("You've Changed"), regret ("Stormy Weather") through to longing for a new affair ("I Wish I Were In Love Again") this is an album where you feel every track has to earn its place. The final track "Both Sides Now", which is singled out by many others as the weakest element on the album, actually takes on a whole new life by being put in as almost the coda to the entire theme of the album. Love comes and goes, and comes again. And when you've seen it from both sides . . . I find it amazing that this song from such a young writer as she was then can hold its head up in such exalted company. Some albums are designed for dipping in to, but I think this is definitely one for listening to from start to finish in a single session. The transition of mood from song to song is just right and there are very few programme albums where you can say this with your hand on your heart. I know it's the wrong thing to ask of Ms. Mitchell, but "more of the same, please" would suit me.

Here Miss Mitchell combines her love of colour in art with her whiskey coloured voice. The nuance is particularly heart felt.The songs seem tinged with pain, and poetry. The echoes of Billie Holiday( Lady in Satin) are pronounced and reverant.If ever Joni has made an effort to send someone a love letter it is to Holiday in her phrasing and smokey vocals. Her Canadian American directness is a metaphor to her artworks included within the cd cover. There is a Hopper-esque lonely solitude that pulls one into a vintage American sensibility. The cd is one that grows on you and penetrates the heart with every layer of listening. A superb rendition of "A Case of You", reminds us that Joni is a classic writer, as well as performer.This cd could have been called "The four seasons of Love".Like Leonard Cohen she sits perfectly with those that enjoy their personal torments and share the depth of the human condition with their listeners.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Joni Mitchell decided to finally record an album of jazz standards. Aside from the jazzy experiments in her own music that started in the mid-70's, Joni recently lended a vocal to jazz bassist Kyle Eastwood's debut CD, and then took part in Don Henley's benefit concert for the Walden Woods Project, where all guest stars performed a standard (Joni sang "Stormy Weather," and recorded another version here). So in theory this album makes perfect sense, and in practice it skirts greatness.

Joni has an obvious affection for the material at hand...you can hear it in the thoughtful readings she gives. And Joni's voice, which has a smoky maturity from countless cigarettes in fifty-plus years, is perfectly suited to bluesy material like "You're My Thrill," "You've Changed," and "Stormy Weather," managing to both maintain her own identity and at times resemble the great Billie Holiday. Other tracks concentrate more symphony's strings than jazz licks, so songs like "Answer Me My Love" and "Don't Go to Strangers" sound lovely but are dangerously close to the realm of Easy Listening. The results are better when the music genuinely swings, as on "Sometimes I'm Happy," helped along by a flawless Herbie Hancock piano solo, or the especially striking "Comes Love."

Two Mitchell originals are given the symphonic treatment here; one works, one doesn't. "Both Sides Now" is transformed from an elegant guitar ballad to a gorgeous piece of mature wisdom perfectly executed. "A Case of You," however, doesn't blend with this sort of arrangement. Big band music pretty much needs lyrics to fit the measures more evenly, and it sometimes seems as if Joni won't fit all of her words in. (A better second choice might have been "Blue Motel Room" from "Hejira," which already sounds like a jazz standard).

It also would have been interesting to hear her strip down a standard and flat-out mess with it, a la Cassandra Wilson or Holly Cole. Even a Bossa Nova arrangement would have broken up the pace, which gets a little monotonous towards the end. But for a mature, jazzy vocal set to lush arrangements, "Both Sides Now" is a class act all the way: one of our most important artists paying homage to some of our most important songs.

A gift to her many fans, Joni Mitchell's BOTH SIDES NOW is a surprising departure for the watercolor songstress. Instead of the musical experimentation of her many, many albums, here she glides effortlessly into the role of a richly gifted singer. While Mitchell's own compostions fit with astounding perfection into this set of jazzy standards, it is her voice, which curls like a waft of thick smoke around these delectable arrangements, that is truly surprising. No longer the many-octaved folk soprano of her youth, Joni now imbues these tried and true melodies with the wisdom and passion of a creative life. You will not find Joni's signature revolt against commercial pop here; instead, the arrangements willingly go to places of unabashed sentimentality and wistful melancholy. A particular highlight is her achingly passionate read on her classic song, A Case of You. The song has aged like fine wine, as has its author, who manages once again to deliver real magic from unexpected places.

Perhaps it will appear I've resorted to hyperbole in writing this review. So be it. Ms. Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" is no less than the most affecting, soul-wrenching, fully-realized, vocal music work of art I've ever been privileged to experience! While I've long admired Joni Mitchell's abilities as a composer/lyricist, I've been less than fond of the high, falsetto voice she usually uses in recording her material. In fact, I have most times preferred to hear her compositions recorded by other artists.

This time around, Joni presents us with a thematic album of songs, dealing with the human love experience, all but two of which are penned by others. Gone is the falsetto. In its place is a deep, sonorant, cigarette scarred, perhaps whiskey tinged instrument that is deliciously thick with emotion. This compelling, new (to me) voice is coupled with the most impeccable phrasing one can ever hope to hear from a singer. The songs, even those decades old, leap into life as if we've never heard them before! I thought, in my fifty-three years, I'd heard every nuance there was to hear in the lyric to "Answer Me, My Love". On first hearing of Joni's version, however, I was shocked to find myself reduced to an agony of tears as she seared her way into my deepest places with her poignantly phrased, dark (almost sooty!), plaintive reading of this 1953 classic.

The highlight of the album is the title cut . . . a Mitchell composition everyone knows. I've a recording of Joni singing "Both Sides Now" many years ago in her familiar, lilting, falsetto style. The year 2000 recording of "Both Sides Now" might as well be a brand new song. It's virtually unrecognizable from the almost fluffy (appropriate for clouds, I suppose) quality it had in its earlier incarnations. In the new, mature rendition - which I don't hesitate to call the `definitive version' - all the wonder, longing, devastation and pathos of a life lived to the fullest are clearly in evidence. One senses Joni Mitchell is reflecting on her own intense journey as she huskily reveals, "I've looked at life from both sides now/From win and lose and still somehow/It's life's illusions that I recall/I really don't know life/I really don't know life at all." I believe you Joni! When it slowly seeped into my consciousness that even someone as artistically gifted and hard- living as Joni Mitchell hasn't any answers, it was strangely comforting. This album is Joni Mitchell's profound offering to those who aren't afraid to admit they "really don't know life at all".

What a shock to hear the current voice of Joni Mitchell! I would not have known it was she. The high trembly girlish warble is now a smoky, emotion-evoking womanly sound that suits the songs on this album to perfection. "Both Sides Now" in this version touches me more than the old version because it conveys a life of experience. I can see why it was chosen for a key scene in the film "Love, Actually." It's a good album for daydreaming and relaxing, maybe with cocktail in hand.

I have been a Jazz drummer all my life, a male in his fourties, 250 pounds ... listening to the cut Both Sides Now (on CD of same title), I just cried. A life, the experience of a lifetime, poured into music, one song. I don't care whether Joni Mitchell's upper registers are gone due to ill health, age and smoking (I never cared too much for her pure falsetto singing in the first palce and find everything after Court And Spark more interesting with respect to her vocal performance), but to listen to that - dare I say spiritual - maturation of a voice, the unselfconscious carving-out of strong yet fragile melodic lines over intelligent Jazz arrangements, is breathtaking, something you hear only in the finest voices (Holiday, Fitzgerald, Krall, Reeves, Wilson).

It's been 25 years since I bought a new Joni Mitchell offering (The Hissing of Summer Lawns). I did a large mental double-take during the opening bars of "You Are My Thrill". Was this low, smoky, mature voice the same bright soprano that sang "Morning Morgantown"?

The album is designed as the cycle of a love affair, from flirtation and the excitement of discovery to rejection and disillusionment. And "Both Sides Now" is the perfect summation. Filled with standards, Joni does her best to make these songs her own. With a few exceptions, she succeeds.

Having said all that, I would still say that this CD is less than a smash hit in my book. I think the lush big band arrangements are not a great compliment for her voice, which seems overmatched here. Her phrasing and vocal style would have been more suited to a Jazz Quartet, something intimate and minimalist.

I came away from this CD with a tremendous appreciation of Ms. Mitchell's versatility. If it didn't knock my socks off, it left me wondering where she will go next.

This work is different from the old Joni of the 1970s and 80s, it isn't better, it isn't worse, it just reflects the passing of time and the influence of maturity on Mitchell's unique phrasing and style.

Her voice retains its soft vulnerability, its clever insightful enuciation for emotional impact, but now has a smoky and sad wisdom and strength.

The orchestration, sometimes a little heavy in the brass section, is warm and rich. Herbie Handcock's piano backup on "Sometimes I'm Happy" actually perfectly compliments Joni, especially when she says the word "happy" with lively gusto.

The premise behind the song selection is that the songs follow a love affair from beginning to end. Yet this armature is twisted in the very first song to reflect mature emotional attachments, infatuations that have been around the block before.

For example, the first song "You're My Thrill" is somewhat sad with Joni singing the work "Thrill" with a sexual maturity rather than teenage glee. She sings the lyrics as a woman who has had the "thrill" before, she feels its power, and she knows the future before the present starts.

I loved Etta James' "At Last" but Joni's is fresh because of a new emphasis on the lyrics.

Joni always has a playful, witty streak in her and "Comes Love" with its funky odd lyrics hits the spot.

Now we come to "A Case of You", surely the finest popular song of the 1970s. Joni sings it with a inner strength and vision that differs from the power and light of the original version.

The CD ends with "Both Sides Now", and a top 40 overly sweet 1967 tune becomes confrontive in its indictment of maturity and experience. I say indictment because with the resinging she demonstrates that whereas maturity and experience are great teachers, the lessons and mysteries are too vast for any of us to ever understand. I played this song for a friend who never liked Joni Mitchell. He told me it was the first time he ever liked Joni Mitchell because he could hear the experience in her voice in this version.

I think this comment tells you how to approach this CD. It is about experience and the way those experiences penetrate but still leave us clueless to the meaning of it all. But Joni makes clueless so nice.

Joni's new CD is simply superb, almost defining the meaning of excellence.

Yes, you'll still want to listen to Billie, Nina and Ella just as you'll still want to listen to 'Blue', 'Hejira' and 'Mingus' etc., but only somebody 'musically challenged' could deny that this is an extraordinary achievement. Joni's vocal limitations in the upper register have provided her with new and marvellously exploited opportunities in the middle range and lower reaches. And of course there is always the extraordinary intelligence of her phrasing which, with very few exceptions, always manages to stay clear of obvious mannerisms.

The orchestral playing and solos are first rank. Indeed the dramatic lushness of the opening track momentarily reminded me of a Mahler symphony or some tone poem of Richard Strauss.

If you haven't heard this CD yet, you have a major treat in store for you!

PS But please don't give up writing songs, Joni -- not yet!