Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell

by David Yaffe

“‘Woodstock’ wouldn’t have been written if I had been there, because those events are full of the back room, full of sibling rivalries. There are pockets of cooperation, but everyone’s desperate to win. It’s not a sports event, but there is that element of it, and it accelerates up to opening night, and it translates to a lot of hideous effort. People will be playing beautiful at rehearsals, but by the time they get to opening night, their performances are grotesque with effort. It’s like competitive children at those events. From the audience, they don’t see it, but you see it backstage. I wouldn’t have been able to write it if I had been there, because I would have been caught up in the backstage neuroses.

Some of the most audacious innovators look outside of what an instrument is even built to do. Charlie Parker was known to have practiced from a violin book. John Coltrane played out of a harp book, trying to make a tenor saxophone play in a single note what the most ornately chordal instrument would play in cascading notes; attempting to make a tenor saxophone play harp chords—to play fast enough, the chords would somehow congeal—Coltrane brought the instrument beyond its intended function.