photo: Michael Wilson
Brad Mehldau
“Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow”
From Joni Mitchell’s 1975 The Hissing of Summer Lawns
LISTEN TO BRAD’S VERSION
LISTEN TO JONI'S ORIGINAL
It’s daunting how much you can take from Joni Mitchell every time you listen to her, because every aspect of her music is compelling: Her lyrics and the meaning they convey; the harmony, melody and structure of her songs, her totally unique approach to playing the guitar and piano; or the bands she assembled for various records. I always return to her records because they yield new pleasure and insight after repeated listening.
The singular quality of Joni Mitchell’s singing, viewing her voice purely as an instrument without even considering her lyrics, has influenced me the most directly in my own (more often voiceless) music. Because this project was about Joni Mitchell’s music, I tried to convey that quality in a more conscious way than I usually would for my take on her song here, “Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow”. When a jazz musician interprets the melody of a song, the way that he or she will impart his or her identity on it is to a large degree dependent on the liberties he takes with the rhythm: A great rendering of a standard, sung by someone like Billie Holiday or Dinah Washington, is full of rhythmic deviations from the original written score, and those deviations constitute, in part, their unique styles - it’s where the meat of the music is. Because Joni Mitchell is both songwriter and singer, her songs come to us a bit like some quintessential versions of great standards - except that the interpreter is also the composer.
Learning to play her music, if you are one, like me, who likes to at least initially show attentive fidelity to the original melody (after years of hearing butchered melodies at jam sessions, where the songs are used merely as improvisational vehicles), is challenging in a similar way, perhaps, to learning some of the great Brazilian standards: Joni Mitchell is like Jobim or Chico Buarque in that, when they are all singing their own songs, if you sit down and listen a bit more analytically, you can imagine a more simple version of the melody that would act as a template of sorts - one that they are happily departing from in their own performance. The trick to playing this music is to split the difference between what you imagine is the ideal melody proper and the version as rendered by the singing composer.
Joni Mitchell’s unique rhythmic approach to melodies has to do, for me, with a total conversational ease that you can really hear on the original version of “Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow”. It’s like she’s talking to you, or talking to herself - a wonderful feeling of casualness that makes the music all the more arresting because there is so much pathos implied in the way she variously clips, staggers, and extends each phrase; in the controlled huskiness of her voice, and in the lyrics themselves. Each verse in this song varies in a different way - she rarely uses the same rhythmic or melodic device in the same way at the same place.
My approach, unconventionally for me, was to try to capture this rhythmic phrasing of her melody more or less literally, and to see how that transfers onto piano. That meant doing a transcription and writing down some stuff. The first thing I noticed was the discrepancy between how Joni’s vocal part looked on the page - complex and unwieldy to play at first - and the way I already knew it sounded - free-spirited, casual yet urgent, and also very funky at times. Finally, for my arrangement, because I kept so closely to the melody itself, more or less playing it as a transcription, I chose to vary everything that surrounded it, and change the accompanying texture of each verse, developing it throughout the song until its resolution, in a way that hopefully captures some of the great feeling of mystery that I’ve always experienced from the original version.
- Brad Mehldau
bradmehldau.com
