Back to my roots... Joni Mitchell met Mingus --- Jazz on Tuesdays

Who knew what I was listening to? Not me. I had never heard anything quite like it. Turns out I was listening to jazz. The LP came out in 1979 and I owned it not too long after it emerged, so I guess I was in high school. Who knows?

I can't even tell you when I first started listening to Joni Mitchell, but by the time I was no longer buying LP's, there were few bands I had more albums by.

So why now does this LP come back to me? Why this birthday does her "Birthday rap" to Charles Mingus float into my head. Who knows. It would be the last project Mingus worked on and the first I would hear. Who knew that 31 years later I would be listening to Mingus in Paris as I cut glass in my studio on my birthday?

I tried to find that Birthday rap, but didn't come up with anything, but I did find the Theology of Mitchell and Mingus...




So a few years back when I checked Mingus's Ah Um out of a library and listened to it, no wonder this tune was so familiar. Joni Mitchell closes with it and it is her lyrics that have come to be associated with the 1959 tune and after so many years, I am glad to document here that young musicians of the San Francisco School Of The Arts still dig this tune and words...





and that art work on the LP cover, that was a painting by Joni Mitchell, whose art may have influenced me a bit. Who knows?