“Ethiopia” faces a complex human calamity with startling chords. The song touched a nerve so deep, its structures confounded even Joni’s most knowing and sympathetic listeners. Wayne Shorter, who had always gone the distance for Joni, was troubled by the chords. Joni recalls he told her that at the Berklee School of Music, they said that you weren’t supposed to follow a suspended chord with another suspended chord. “What kinds of chords are these?” he asked. “These are not guitar chords. These are not piano chords.” (Wayne Shorter, incidentally, has a music education degree from NYU and an
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