Joni Covers: Jazz Saxophone Tributes

Herbie Hancock, ft. Wayne Shorter: Both Sides Now

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Paul Desmond: Song to a Seagull

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Joshua Redman: I Had a King

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Let's check out some jazzy Joni covers, yeah? Here are three that focus on the saxophone. I used to play this amazing instrument, but sadly, none of the songs I ever learned were nearly as cool as these. It may seem counterintuitive to feature songs of a remarkable lyricist that have been stripped of the lyrics, but this allows us to focus on the melodies. Which are also remarkable, as we'll see.

I'll start with the low-hanging fruit. Herbie Hancock, the genius jazz keyboardist who's played with everyone who's anyone in the jazz world, released an entire tribute album to Joni in 2007, called "River: The Joni Letters." To everyone's surprise (except those of us who, you know, actually listened to it), Herbie's tribute ended up as the Grammy Album of the Year. How could it not? I'm going with one of the few instrumentals on the CD, but even then, it features Wayne Shorter, who is every bit as awesomesauce as Herbie. If you're a Steely Dan fan, you've heard him on "Aja". If you're a jazz fan, you know him from later Miles Davis, Weather Report, and, um, other Herbie Hancock recordings.

If you've ever listened to "Take Five," that idiosyncratic, arrhythmic, and classic ode to the 5/4 time signature, then you've heard Paul Desmond's alto saxophone. His was a defining musical voice of West Coast (aka Cool) Jazz. Here's his 1973 take on one of Joni's earliest songs, recorded before even Joni herself began to follow the jazz muse of her later work. And if you pay attention to these sorts of things, Grammy winner Don Sebesky is the arranger.

Another west-coast jazz musician, this one a son of saxman Dewey Redman, gives us our last saxophone tribute to Joni. Joshua Redman has other credits to his name, including the PBS TV shows Arthur and Reading Rainbow, and, and, and OMG he's the saxophonist on the anime series Cowboy Bebop, an oeuvre from which I'll try to work in songs in future posts….oh, where was I? Oh, right. Here's a 1998 Joni cover.

Songs Called Songs: Song to a Seagull

Joni Mitchell: Song to a Seagull

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It’s hard to imagine, after all these years, how bizarre Joni Mitchell’s debut must have sounded at that time. Ostensibly a new folk singer, Mitchell played folk music from an alternate universe. Early fans tore their hair out trying to play her guitar parts, not realizing that Mitchell used her own tunings. Her vocal lines used interval jumps that had never been heard on the folk circuit before. And the production on Song to a Seagull, the album, emphasized this sense of alienness.

The song is about the freedom Mitchell sought vs the restrictions she felt. The seagull is free of any expectations from humanity. As Mitchell sings, “no dreams can possess you, no voices can blame you.” By contrast, the human world is represented by the city, which Mitchell calls, “an island of noise in a cobblestone sea”. These may be the words of a not-much-more-than-teenager from the sixties, but the poetry still works.

Paul Desmond: Song to a Seagull

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Mitchell’s music has always made sense to jazz artists, and the sentiment of Song to a Seagull could easily describe the freedom that some artists find in jazz. So it only makes sense that jazz artist Paul Desmond would be drawn to the song. Desmond was the sax player for Dave Brubeck for many years. This track shows that his recordings under his own name were just as fine.