Music CD - Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark

	Music CD: Court and Spark Artist: Joni Mitchell List Price: $11.98 Our Price: $6.92 Your Save: $ 5.06 ( 42% ) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Manufacturer: Elektra / Wea
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Tracks: 1. Court And Spark 2. Help Me 3. Free Man In Paris 4. People's Parties 5. The Same Situation 6. Car On A Hill 7. Down To You 8. Just Like This Train 9. Raised On Robbery 10. Trouble Child 11. Twisted
Binding: Audio CD EAN: 0075596059329 Label: Elektra / Wea Manufacturer: Elektra / Wea Number Of Discs: 1 Publisher: Elektra / Wea Release Date: 1990-10-25 Studio: Elektra / Wea
Accessories Dead Reckoning
Related Items Blue Ladies of the Canyon Hejira For the Roses The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: A pleasant diversion between two masterpieces Comment: "For the Roses" preceded and "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" followed this album, and they stand as perhaps Joni Mitchell's finest albums ever. "Court and Spark" is a mostly pleasant diversion by comparison. Joni well deserved the airplay and chart success of this album, but she is right to be ambivalent about it. "Help Me", "Free Man", "Twisted" and "Raised on Robbery" are first rate fun, and "Trouble Child" is an ace, but the rest of the album drags in comparison, with her self-observations and world-observations not ringing as true or as deeply as on earlier and later work. Several of the songs don't wear well with time, even as compared with her very earliest work. But the pleasures are notable, including a couple of my favorites: Joni's voice hanging over the word "good" as the backup voices intone "didn't it feel good?" on "Help Me". The creepy muted trumpets and "breaking waves" guitar of "Trouble Child". And who can resist "Twisted"? If Joni ever did a song that better conveyed her delightful laughing side, I'm unaware of it. Customer Rating: Summary: This girl is a woman now. Comment: "Court and Spark" marked the quantum leap for Joni Mitchell. The young introspective woman who turned inside herself so deftly on Blue suddenly opened up, both personally and musically. The hints of jazz that peaked through on For the Roses explode full force here, yet the key elements of Joni's sound are intact. She just sounds looser and more willing to play out on songs like "Help Me" (the commercial breakthrough) and the comical "Raised on Robbery." More crucial to the development here is Mitchell's looking to others instead of herself as song subjects. The notorious "Free Man In Paris" was Joni translating label honcho and friend David Geffen's malaise with the music industry. The goofy desperate protagonist in "Raised on Robbery" hounds her mark at the bar until he's running away in fear. The musicians color in the spaces exquisitely, with Tom Scott leading the way. The muted trumpets and saxophones that pepper the album made "Court and Spark" one of the jazziest pop albums to yield top 40 singles. It is also, without question, one of the most important albums by a female artist. The production was also vibrant. Choirs of voices sometimes arc out from the songs, adding an ethereal quality. The guest list - everyone from David Crosby, Graham Nash, Jose Feliciano and Cheech & Chong - fill in their cameos without overstating them. The merging of jazz and folk here was exquisitley produced, to this day it sounds fresh and exciting. She still had moments where the lady of the confessional canyon spoke up (the title track, "Trouble Child"), yet for the most part, Mitchell made "Court and Spark" the first major stylistic shift of an album in a career that is laced with them. Customer Rating: Summary: Love it, but "For the Roses" reigns supreme!!!!!!! Comment: Of course Court and Spark deserves the highest praise, the first listen leaves you speechless!! But for me "For the Roses" is my absolute favorite, and easily the finest Joni Mitchell studio album ever made!! Being a music lover and also an audiophile I think this is the first Joni album that really had drastically improved sound. In fact, I think Court and Spark was a slight step backward for sound quality. Roses also sounds better than the "Hissing of Summer lawns". Roses just has the best detail and transparency! Back to the music, I'm constantly amazed how people will praise Blue and Court in the same sentence, and completely ignore Roses which was released in '72 between the other two. Wake up people and open your ears!!! Roses is utterly SUPERIOR to blue, and easily equals or surpasses Court and Spark. I know there are other fans out there that will agree with this. Listen to "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire", "You Turn Me On", "Electricity", "Woman of Heart and Mind" and you'll know what I'm talking about. These song equal anything on Blue or Court. All I'm saying it that you need to hear this album if you have never. It was the last Joni album I bought back in the vinyl days, and I was just blown away by what I missed all those years. Please GO BUY IT TODAY!!!! Customer Rating: Summary: One of Joni's finest Comment: Court And Spark sees Joni Mitchell combining folk with elements of jazz and Tin-Pan Alley styled pop, to intoxicating effect. These songs are lush, nuanced, and ethereal, with dense and evocative melodies gushing over hazy textures. Joni's lyrics, which cast a poetic eye upon love, friendship, and independence, are smartly and impeccably crafted. The results are often phenomenal. There's the blissfully helpless "Help Me," and the sunny, wistful taste of freedom that is "Free Man In Paris." The title track is spare and almost beautifully otherworldly, while "People's Parties" shoots a few strings of sunlight and humanity into the decadent world of the upper class. "Same Situation" is full of oceanic pianos and yearning lyrics, while "Raised On Robbery" is a rollicking, funny, and sardonically smart look at the oh-so-modern dating scene. "Down To You" is a gorgeous almost-epic which features layer upon layer of hallucinogenic instrumentation with a hauntingly broken vocal melody. At times it sounds like a more commercial Tim Buckley recording. A comical, slyly self-deprecating cover of an old vocal jazz tune ("Twisted") concludes one of the finest albums of the 70s. You'll love it. Customer Rating: Summary: Love Tracks...... Comment: This was a present to me for my birthday in 19...I just forget...1975, 80, 90? Might be good for a listen this July 4th thinking here about what we find to complete us in life, our choices, our diversions, our battles, where we stand up and for what we do what we do, ultimately...with a life. It all comes down to this. Celebration of freedom on our 4th, I think of this album. Young, drawing, painting, feeling, living life it fit every feeling I had at that time in my 25,30 year old life. Standing alone looking at heaven on earth, for surely nature doesn't do it better, I remember listening once on a Walkman player with ear things driving me to distortion trying to walk the trail early morning out to Point Lobos, CA. I was also in some of the worst physical pain of my life which now seems relative, my spine, with no idea the reason for the hurt that took ten more years of being told it was imagined, over the real debilitating degenerative spinal condition it actually was.....This a walk about self belief and external disapproval and the collision of something so playfully contained in Joni Mitchell's tune from this album...about one's sanity. Walking wondering how my faults could generate this as my 'other' half and medical doc were so happily stating as "obvious". Reached the limits of self loathing and external disharmony for the waste of time they are. As you move through this trail it opens onto ocean pitched as suspended above on a precipice. I stood on the edge. With that aquamarine pool far down the rocks below, this music probably stopped me from jumping, my hoping to reach the perfection of arresting time in the just then. Visual external perfection weighted against internal incapacity to meet the moment with joy, hit me. Then. Inadequate by definitions. And this trip on my birthday this weekend brought back both songs and those silences in the past to grapple. It passed from my daily memory in days bleeding through my fingers as does water and maybe, too, passing flesh like lit kerosene...the contradictions of love, living, fire, your speck of stardust flashing, suffering...it's here in her words. Burning, quenching. Our Dualities. And that hand she offered me and held out meant something. Then and now listening again...today. It did stop me from flying out to see those cormorants that day, to realize this was just a path I traveled/weathered. Could and would take others. Could. Would. Will. And such a lonvely path it can be sometimes. Her singing just gave me a sense there might be someone that had an understanding what life might really just be. It was a Beautiful present. I don't think 'laughing it all away' was missed in my life then. It brought me this musical seed...growing inside.. my own Tree of Knowledge....the processing of teaching in South Central, poverty, others suffering at the hands of those unconcerned and greedy, illnesses, pain, relating, loving, failing, being reduced to clown,my loss of a baby, loss of innocent place in this world had me on my knees....actually on my back...and I remember standing listening that day long ago all the way through rather frozen....and days just passed on until I was listening again in times with my children...growing....trade-offs bargained in situations constructing many lead walls all through our personal and societal worlds..opening windows in my heart, ... I was falling in love with the notion I could live making, doing, in my own spaces and sing to a girl losing loves, finding loves, turning to work with a group of children no one ever saw, no one ever saw.... Turning around in the whirl of time passing and melodies blowing through your heart. She sang the lust, the desire, the truth of waiting for stolen moments, of wanting, of needing to push forward into meaning something, doing something of value independent of a self that burns all it touches with petty insignificance, waves I sat and watched in Malibu. Why does it come as shock to know you have no one? She sings... Another dream over the damn. My right to be human going over too, over the fall.....when I went in the waves at Malibu I nearly drown. In so far I was sucked under. Still trying to surface... her soul reading mine, ours. Seen. I must have played this album a million times. Until in my dull repetitive way it blossomed into my being with that oboe playing, "It all comes down to you." And it does. Riddled now with aches, pains, limits,idiotic trivial delusions, truths and contradictions I listen to this and develop the most intense kaleidoscopic Alice vision of my days.Returning via mirror to the repelling external truths. We blow most of life. When I do go, play this and that'll be wonderful, and know I mostly acted thinking of "Help Me"......it centered in my heart. The things contained in man's , my soul, reaching for another and love, and I turned to reach for a way to meaning, to do something with some value. Risk making meanings and loving our world. Risk it. Your mistakes will always outweigh everything. It's the human condition...but we have to try. For something. It brought me to teach children...longing had to be contained. Caged. Knowing her call for freedom for bird, kitten, fish, all creatures great and loved mattered more...matters more .....comes inside.....slips away....floats like a melody through my soul. Joni Mitchell on this album brought into my life a flash of enlightenment. And in my passions the fruit of loves, living ....danced....cried out. I want to quote songs, favorites, pieces of genius. I also want to feel the words fly around in my mind so I think I will go just listen and recommend it with some fresh July strawberry-raspberry rhubarb pie. Savor your freedoms, it was bought at a price no money changer can refund. More Reviews
Editorial Reviews: Painter-turned-folksinger Joni Mitchell had slipped stark saxophone solos into her prior album, For the Roses, and her singing had often hinted at a capacity for bluesier fare than her guitar- and piano-framed confessional ballads offered. None of those hints prepared fans for this sudden, expansive shift toward a much larger canvas--a sleeker, orchestrated pop style pulsing with jazz elements. Court & Spark found Mitchell casting aside her earth mother affectations and revealing herself as the thoroughly modern, thoroughly complicated woman she is; the songs sustained familiar preoccupations with relationships but replaced courtly settings and naturalistic imagery with recognizably modern locales. Deeply romantic, constantly questioning, classic tracks like the title song, "Help Me," "Free Man in Paris," "Same Situation," and "Raised on Robbery" display a more liberated Mitchell, ready to rumble with unbridled electric guitars (guest Robbie Robertson on "...Robbery"), even willing to poke fun at her own oh-so-sensitive rep with a hip cover of Annie Ross's hilarious "Twisted." --Sam Sutherland