• Solid Love
  For her long fade-out, she did some Kansas City-in-the-30s riffs that made me wonder if the whole song might work that way. Once I was thinking KC, the first two bars started swinging in my head “You got it right; yeah, you got it right!” From that, the other elements followed: rhythm guitar, horn riffs behind the solo, Lew Tabackin’s sound on tenor, which is his alone. The background riffs, by the way, are all transcribed as accurately as I could do, from her original. For the alternate take, because we were only half the size of a big band, I added harmonica, an instrument which blends beautifully with all the jazz horns.
  
• Song for Sharon
  She sings with unbelievably hip rhythms and phrasing; her vocal on this is as good an example as there is. It can’t be notated but I gave a tape of one chorus (they’re all different, of course) to Dave Friedman and said “Nail this,” which he did. I think this is my favorite of all her songs, so even though I couldn’t transform it out of her beat, I wanted to include it.
  
• Edith and The Kingpin
  This is a true transformation, one of the first that occurred to me. The song has modal harmony, like the Miles Davis-Gil Evans recordings and Miles’s Kind of Blue. Joni Mitchell did it in the persona of a street-wise, largely objective observer; the music’s almost perky. But there’s plenty of pain in what she describes (she never denies that, by the way) and awareness of that pain plus my hearing the harmony as Miles’s and Gil’s led to a dark, ballad approach. Randy Brecker made it happen on the second take.
  
• Coyote
  The rhythmic energy in her recordings couldn’t be matched playing this melody in any different groove, so I tried to stay with hers. Because her opening (“No regrets, Coyote”) is spoken more than sung, we had no musical phrase there. I think I found a good solution: horns alone trading fours with the rhythm section, not really committing to a rhythm ‘til halfway through the first chorus.
  
• In the Bleachers
  Some of her lyrics are stories of particular moments or relationships. Others are meditations which may range widely, but have a theme, a focus or are addressed to one person. This one, by contrast, seems fragmented, snapshots loose in a cardboard box. For me, it was so unusual it suggested madness, pointed me to the tactic of distortion for this chart. Her song has a diatonic piano accompaniment; I made it chromatic and used a whole group of instruments. Her recording ends with a very simple instrumental vamp; I ended with a vamp also, but it’s as ”out” as I could make it. Peter Herbert was vitally supportive and helpful as I worked this one through.
  
• The Fiddle and the Drum
  She recorded it unaccompanied in, maybe 1969. She cast herself as an innocent Canadian, with a plea (or a warning) for America to remember its historic, life-affirming impulse (the fiddle). The drum, of course, symbolized the willful, the macho, the murderousness against Asian peasants. I had heard Ed Neumeister play magnificently in the “Tricky” Sam Nanton style, so I cast his horn in the role of speaking her words. Too much time has has passed for me to remember if I actually got the idea to do this song as a result of hearing him play, but it’s not impossible. To affirm life, I’m proud to have thought of one of the greatest of all jazz compositions, “All about Rosie,” by George Russell, my teacher.
  
• Shadows and Light
  It was probably written four or five years after “The Fiddle and the Drum” and one of its themes was moral ambiguity. She pointed to “the perils of benefactors; the blessings of parasites.” So I laid two contrasting jazz rhythms end to end, trying to smear them into one piece. I knew Thomas Chapin could handle it. He’s played many fine solos for me after I boxed him in with weird rhythms and forms. Mike LeDonne threw in that little gliss behind the bridge on his own, really established the organ character of this chart: God is, indeed, in the details. That was just one of the many moments when the musicians, by and large unfamiliar with Joni Mitchell’s songs, came up with spontaneous ways to help me put adequate frames around her very formidable works.

In sum, I think I have been able to do what no one else has: played as authentic jazz representative songs of the best and most original post-Tin Pan Alley songwriter we’ve ever heard. Able to do it because, not being committed to one style or instrumentation, I have been able to follow her songs further into their own nature than would otherwise have been possible.

—David Lahm, November 1998