Craig Werner on Ann Powers' TRAVELING

A rave review from one of our favorite writers

Craig Werner is our friend, teacher, colleague, and collaborator, as well as one of our favorite writers. Recently on Goodreads, he posted this wonderful review of another of our friends, colleagues, and favorite writers, tackling Ann Powers’ new Traveling: On The Path of Joni Mitchell with the thoughtfulness, sophistication, and great writing we’ve come to expect from both of them. We loved the piece so much that we asked Craig if we could reprint it here, and he agreed. So here’s Werner on Powers, Mitchell, and more. Thanks, Craig.

One of the most satisfying of the hundreds of music books I've read in the course of a career listening to, meditating on, and writing about music. There are two things I look for in a book centered on an individual artist. First, does it help me hear music I love in more emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually complex ways. Second, does it give me a deeper apprehension of the lived experience of the musician. Traveling fulfills both of those challenges in a stunning manner. I've lived with Joni Mitchell's music from my late teens on, responding more immediately to some albums than others, and, as Powers' book made me realize, missing a couple almost entirely. Like zillions of other hippies, I took her early albums (Ladies of the Canyon, Clouds) to heart. Like a somewhat smaller number of male listeners, I understood Blue and For the Roses calls to reconsider my highly conditioned and mostly unconscious patriarchal thought patterns and behaviors. As someone who thinks of jazz not as a marketing category but as a commitment to pushing into wild zones (the feminist phrasing) of experience, I "got" her work with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and received her collaboration with Charles Mingus with real joy. But, while I certainly gave each album a spin as it appeared, Traveling made me aware of how superficially I'd responded to Turbulent Indigo, Night Ride Home and Chalk Marks in a Storm. Better late than never, I've been listening deeply as I made my way through Powers' engagement, returning to re-read and re-think along the way. Very few musical books have changed my listening life--a central part of all the rest of my life--as much as this beautiful book. I came out feeling that I understood a great deal more about the pressures and complexities and contradictions Mitchell had lived through and processed into both her lyrics and her sound.

A good deal of that is because alongside the musical exploration, Powers has written one of the best books about the lived experience of feminism over the last half century. In scanning some of the reviews of the book (I do my best to avoid social media entirely but heard from music writer friends that the response to Traveling hadn't been as universal as I'd assumed), I took note of the complaints that there was too much Powers in the text. Which is utter nonsense. The nature of call-and-response, the African diasporic aesthetic deeply embedded in Mitchell's work absolutely requires personal presence. That's not to be confused with the types of essentially solipsistic worrying about one's abstract identity that infect so much current cultural discourse. Yes, identity does matter; no, it doesn't limit the possible range of response. It's a very tricky challenge and Powers pulls it off perfectly. She provides information about her experiences that condition her response to Mitchell, but understands that the point of that is illuminating both the continuities and the differences in what it means to "live feminist." (She cites both Sara Ahmed's Living a Feminist Life and Alice Echols' Daring to Be Bad, key texts from different cultural eras that I highly recommend.). If I were still actively teaching young folks interested in writing about culture, I'd make the introduction to Traveling required reading on how to position one's self.

As that suggests, Traveling presents any number of challenges to male readers to check their attitudes and responses. Powers is sympathetically unsparing to the men in Mitchell's life and audience. There were several points where my defensiveness activated and mostly when I'd thought about it, I agreed with the implications of what she was saying. And that leads back to why and how re-engaging Mitchell's music, particularly the more recent phases, is busy readjusting my sense of the world.

Which leads to my one caveat (because no honest response can ever be, simply, admiring). I understand and honor why Powers devotes a chapter to critiquing the racial masquerade of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, the culmination of a period in which Mitchell created and lived in the persona of a Black man. In 21st century terms, that's cause for cancelling or at the very least judgmental critique. Powers understands it's not a simple situation, but in the end, she feels obligated to issue statements of disapproval that felt to me a bit like "she should have known better like we do now." I've worked extensively with what African American novelist Ralph Ellison (who wrote brilliantly on minstrelsy in an essay that seems to have been totally forgotten) called the "jazz impulse," which was a cultural touchstone during the mid/late 60s and early 70s. Jazz in that sense marked a commitment to exploring complications and taking massive risks--testing phrasings to see if they work, recognize when they don't. In ways that have become illegible today, that means rejecting polite, predetermined notions of who one was or could be. Pushing the boundaries was real and there were times that led in directions that weren't productive. When that happens, own it, and move on. Learn from the ancestors and elders, as we can learn from Mitchell. For my taste, Powers' discussion of Don Juan leads to a resolution that doesn't ring quite true to me with my understanding of how the most important multiracial conversations work. I think Powers' understanding of Mitchell as a kind of queer ancestor in her brilliant final chapter captures the complexities perfectly, so I don't think this thought stream reduces the book's value. But I'm writing about it here to provide a sense of how it made me think.

So many other great things about Traveling: the nuanced research into how Rolling Stone covered Mitchell and other musicians at the time; a beautiful "playlist" tracking the call and response between Mitchell and the boys around her (Crosby, Nash, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen); the very well done reflections on fusion jazz; the aforementioned epilog on Mitchell's connections with Brian Blades, John Kelly (whose work I hadn't paid attention to), and Brandi Carlile.

I'll just end by saying Ann Powers writes with clarity and grace (as anyone who follows her NPR writing is aware). Anyone who cares about music and for that matter life should read this book.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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