Joni Mitchell’s album Court and Spark begins with its title song. Give it a listen, and then maybe take a look at the sheet music. Some things to notice, mentioned by the guy who made the transcription:
Points of interest include the 3 against 4 rhythms between the hands, the parallel (not relative) major/minor tonalities of E and E minor (by now a familiar feature of Joni’s composing, as well as Paul McCartney’s incidentally) and the frequent use of suspended “chords of inquiry,” as she called them.
“Chords of inquiry” is Joni’s term for sus chords — which “suspend” (i.e., don’t play) the third of a triad and instead go down to play the second or go up to play the fourth. When you remove that third the chord itself also becomes as it were suspended between major and minor. It is ambivalent; it moves us to inquiry into its character.
“Court and Spark” is a piano song, but Joni was in her younger days an exceptional guitarist and used many alternate tunings to help her find and play more elegantly those chords of inquiry. You can hear a classic example of how she liked to play guitar here — a live recording made in a café in Ottawa in 1968 by a Joni fanboy. The recording was lost for half-a-century and only saved at all because that fanboy was … Jimi Hendrix. (By the way, here’s the guitar tablature for that song. Look at all those sus chords! And in a “Joni tuning,” with four strings tuned to D!)
Back to the description of “Court and Spark”: the piano part’s three-against-four is noteworthy, but also you should listen for the big change in the rhythm (though not strictly speaking the tempo) at 1:14. And I haven’t even mentioned the singing: her endlessly flexible and imaginative timing, her trademark sliding up to target notes, etc. Or the distinctive elegance of the lyric.
So there’s a lot going on in this song, in pretty much all the ways that a song can have things going on. It’s haunting, meditative, reflective, full of musical inquiry — and this is how Joni Mitchell decided to start her album, which …
… went to Number Two on the Billboard chart, and finished as the thirteenth-best-selling album of 1974.
The big record labels today mastermind every step of a record’s making: they bring in songwriters and song consultants to write, edit, tweak, and doctor songs — Beyonce’s Lemonade famously had so many that no one seems to know the exact number (some say 60, some say 72). Then you get multiple producers and engineers, and arrangers who think only of whether songs can cross the 30-second mark on Spotify so people will get paid. The great majority of songs use four chords, the Axis of Awesome progression or one closely related.
But fifty years ago an eccentric Canadian singer-songwriter, armed only with her own unique voice and musical imagination, wrote and sang — and produced! She’s the one who roped in the extraordinary musicians that play on Court and Spark — an album of songs that went almost to the top of the charts then and still sounds brilliant today. There’s a lesson here for those with ears to hear.
UPDATE: From a 2004 profile of Joni:
“I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate. I thought, that’s interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist — not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That’s why I spend my time now painting.”
