Joni Mitchell’s extraordinary gift for images and phrases first caught my ear, as much as her voice, with the jazz-textured 1975 album The Hissing Of Summer Lawns.
A lot of people love Joni Mitchell as the winsome acoustic singer-songwriter who emerged from Laurel Canyon at the end of the Sixties.

Although I first heard her via back then, via her only hit single Big Yellow Taxi, I never knew those early albums like Clouds and Blue. I didn’t really didn’t take any notice until five years later when she made The Hissing Of Summer Lawns.

It’s a far cry from those early acoustic confessionals, transporting her (and the listener) deep into the territory commonly known as jazz, where she discovers dimensions far beyond those beloved bedsit albums that made her name.

I’m no expert on jazz, a genre whose nuances have always eluded me, but there is something about the way it flows – the way the purity of her distinctive voice is enveloped in the warm embrace of musicians who play with intuition and precision in equal measure.

The instrument that really captures my ear is the bass playing of Max Bennett, synchronised with the lazy shuffle of John Guerin’s drums, though this – the opening song – also features some equally virtuosic guitar from Steely Dan’s Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, appearing in a solitary guest spot.

In France They Kiss On Main Street sets the tone perfectly, the burbling bass and gentle strum of an acoustic guitar surrounding Mitchell’s swooping vocals, joined on the choruses by an all-star backing trio of James Taylor, David Crosby and Graham Nash, amplified by those fluid electric guitar lines by Baxter.

Her lyrics gloriously evoke a bygone era of innocence as she recalls an idyllic smalltown childhood in which her coming of age runs parallel to the evolution of rock’n’roll music in the Fifties: a time of pool halls and pinball arcades, push-up brassieres, tight dresses and rhinestones, “kissing in the back-seat thrilling to the Brando-like things he said.”

The rest of the album is fantastic too, from the ahead-of-its-time sampling of the Burundi drummers on The Jungle Line to the ahead-of-its time themes of The Boho Dance, a song that challenges the frequently heard criticism that by striving for commercial succcess, musicians compromise their artistic integrity.

That song features the indelible image of a “priest with a pornographic watch,” typical of her extraordinary gift for images and phrases that linger in your memory – “Anima rising” (Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow), “Small town, big man” (Edith And The King Pin), “The perils of benefactors, the blessings of parasites” (Shadows And Light).

And the trophy wife of the title track, imprisoned behind barbed wire in an ivory tower with a view of “blue pools squinting in the sun and the hissing of summer lawns.” You can almost smell the bougainvillea and feel her loneliness.