Great conversation. I’m one of those people who got into Joni Mitchell in my early 20s and didn’t find her later albums (everything after Mingus) as interesting -- you’ve given me good reason to revisit that body of work!
We are going to quote you in advertising the OTHER great orchestra in Calgary that performs at the Jack, the Calgary Civic Symphony and our upcoming concert featuring mezzo Andrea Hill and Vafa Adib’s hammered dulcimer. It’s all Scheherazade! The quote is thoughtfully accurate:
“This business of going to hear a symphony orchestra should be encouraged. If you live in a city, you probably live near a good orchestra. The people there are proud of their work and eager to welcome you.”
I used to listen to "Chalkmark in a Rainstorm" to prepare myself for work, or even a party, the way some people would blast AC/DC into their brains. The music felt bottomless; there were all those crazy chords - Joni's infamously eccentric guitar tunings - and the interplanetary spaces in her rhythm arrangements and of course her expressive voice. It's an astonishing album and totally radio unfriendly.
You can find a YouTube clip of her appearance at the Grammys where she "debuted" the new version of Both Sides Now; the sustained applause at the end is quite remarkable.
I was always a fan of Elvis Costello but never moreso than when I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair in 2004 and found an interview he did with Joni Mitchell. She was just past her very embittered stage (at show business) and was releasing new admixtures of her mid to later career albums when Elvis dropped by. You can learn a lot from this interview, and not just that she had a cat named Nietzsche.
I was the guy who asked for an MP3 link, and the page does have an MP3 played by it. But no link. If you right-click on the player, you can't download the MP3; if you pull apart the HTML in the page, you find three different MP3 links to "JennyNeural.mp3" in different directories - all three are five-minute ads for other posts.
But, that's basically my problem, because I'm old, and suspicious of all streaming services. My desire to just be handed an MP3 runs afoul of the whole modern world, which has automatic web-page authoring tools that do almost anything rather than give you the MP3 link (mostly, there are javascript programs that start the playing in ways hard for a human to get underneath) - and for the very good reason that the MP3 would be copied and posted far and wide, undermining the revenue stream of the content creator.
Any of it can be subverted, obviously - with other services, I simply play the podcast on my computer with the sound down, and a program grabbing the whole audio stream into a sound editor; it's neither complicated nor onerous.
So this is not a complaint, or a request for even-more-transparent MP3 posting; I'm good.
It's just a wry comment that the modern world just has to make *some* things difficult, that the Internet was designed to make easy.
I enjoyed this conversation. Keep the arts stuff coming! My familiarity with Sarah Slean dates to her Tori Amos phase. Will check out her newer work, and Jenny Berkel.
Great conversation. I’m one of those people who got into Joni Mitchell in my early 20s and didn’t find her later albums (everything after Mingus) as interesting -- you’ve given me good reason to revisit that body of work!
We are going to quote you in advertising the OTHER great orchestra in Calgary that performs at the Jack, the Calgary Civic Symphony and our upcoming concert featuring mezzo Andrea Hill and Vafa Adib’s hammered dulcimer. It’s all Scheherazade! The quote is thoughtfully accurate:
“This business of going to hear a symphony orchestra should be encouraged. If you live in a city, you probably live near a good orchestra. The people there are proud of their work and eager to welcome you.”
I used to listen to "Chalkmark in a Rainstorm" to prepare myself for work, or even a party, the way some people would blast AC/DC into their brains. The music felt bottomless; there were all those crazy chords - Joni's infamously eccentric guitar tunings - and the interplanetary spaces in her rhythm arrangements and of course her expressive voice. It's an astonishing album and totally radio unfriendly.
You can find a YouTube clip of her appearance at the Grammys where she "debuted" the new version of Both Sides Now; the sustained applause at the end is quite remarkable.
I was always a fan of Elvis Costello but never moreso than when I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair in 2004 and found an interview he did with Joni Mitchell. She was just past her very embittered stage (at show business) and was releasing new admixtures of her mid to later career albums when Elvis dropped by. You can learn a lot from this interview, and not just that she had a cat named Nietzsche.
https://jonimitchell.com/library/view.cfm?id=1182
Thanks for bringing Sarah Slean back into my life. I've been ignoring her for too long.
I was the guy who asked for an MP3 link, and the page does have an MP3 played by it. But no link. If you right-click on the player, you can't download the MP3; if you pull apart the HTML in the page, you find three different MP3 links to "JennyNeural.mp3" in different directories - all three are five-minute ads for other posts.
But, that's basically my problem, because I'm old, and suspicious of all streaming services. My desire to just be handed an MP3 runs afoul of the whole modern world, which has automatic web-page authoring tools that do almost anything rather than give you the MP3 link (mostly, there are javascript programs that start the playing in ways hard for a human to get underneath) - and for the very good reason that the MP3 would be copied and posted far and wide, undermining the revenue stream of the content creator.
Any of it can be subverted, obviously - with other services, I simply play the podcast on my computer with the sound down, and a program grabbing the whole audio stream into a sound editor; it's neither complicated nor onerous.
So this is not a complaint, or a request for even-more-transparent MP3 posting; I'm good.
It's just a wry comment that the modern world just has to make *some* things difficult, that the Internet was designed to make easy.
I enjoyed this conversation. Keep the arts stuff coming! My familiarity with Sarah Slean dates to her Tori Amos phase. Will check out her newer work, and Jenny Berkel.