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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tremaine Lee was 38, his body gave out.
He suffered a sudden heart attack, a moment that forced him to stop and confront what he'd been carrying for years.
Lee had reported on lives cut short by America's gun violence epidemic.
And in facing his own mortality, he realized the toll those stories had taken on his own body.
His new memoir A Thousand Ways to Die is part history, part reporting and part personal turning point.
The book reads like a plea for people to see the humanity of those lost to gun violence and for this country to finally care enough to act.
Lee takes us into communities like New Orleans, Philadelphia and Chicago, where he spent years documenting gun violence and its ripple effects.
He traces the bloody history and relationships Black Americans have with firearms and recalls the near misses in his own youth, also following his ancestors' path back to Ghana, to the legacy of the Middle Passage.
Lee and his colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize for The Times-Picayune's coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
He's also an Emmy-winning journalist, a contributor to MSNBC, and has written for The New York Times and HuffPost.
Tremaine Lee, welcome to Fresh Air.
Tanya, thank you so much for having me.
So you start this book with this vivid description of the day you almost died.
And it's the summer of 2017.
You're at home with your wife and your six-year-old daughter, Nola.
And kids that age, they ask oftentimes profound questions.
And her questions made you consider things you had never faced before, like the weight of witnessing so much death as a reporter.
Yeah.
You know, I think back to her little curious self and asking the most honest, the question that we all had how did this happen?
And like my answer of you know some, some soft plaque broke off and it got clogged by a blood clot.
Just wasn't sufficient for any of us.
And so, for the first time really, I had to look deep and engage with what was truly bearing down on my heart.
And for me, that had been more than a decade of telling stories of black death and survival.
And along those years I was gathering little ribbons, little pieces, little pictures of every single story that I covered.
And especially during those younger years when I was a police reporter in Trenton and Philly and New Orleans.
I was at the crime scenes often.
I'd find young men who look just like me, right wearing my same sneakers, same haircut, dead from gunshot wounds.
And I'd see family members who I could imagine who looked like mine.
And I was carrying all that.
And what I didn't recognize as some of the early warning signs of what it was that was bearing down on me were my sleepless nights.
You know, I thought it was just stress.
You know, my stress lives in my sleep.
It doesn't change the way I act or respond to friends or my general feeling, right?
But I couldn't sleep properly.
And so that was the first sign.
And engaging with that, what I was really carrying, understanding just how heavy heavy that weight was.
And not just the weight of the stories that I told as a journalist of Black Death, but But also a family history that's been marked by a lot of the same stuff.
You know, growing up, I always heard the story of Grandpa Morris, a big man with salt and pepper hair and a baritone voice.
And his CB buddies called him Big Daddy.
And everybody loved him.
He was shot and killed in 1976.
And so I was raised with the enormity of that gap.
Two years before I was born, he was killed.
But I felt like I knew him in a sense, or I knew what it was like to miss him.
I knew his figure.
The figure that was cut out of our family like a picture and it's cut out and you still see the outline.
I could see that.
How old were you when you found out about him and you found out about the way he died?
I must have been.
Nola's age.
I was old enough to understand what death was, but not fully old enough to understand what it means to have someone taken from you, right.
Because I hadn't lost anyone up to that point.
And the way they talked about him was so glowing.
He was this heroic figure, you know, this super heroic figure that everybody loved.
Never heard a bad word about him.
And early on, it was just that he was that somebody shot him.
And then it was that he was killed and then it was murdered.
And then I started hearing stories in my teenage years from my mother especially, who would talk about the pain that she felt going into that courtroom every single day for the man who killed her father and seeing the pictures of my grandfather's body.
And they had these lines or markers or something showing where he was shot in his mouth, in his chest and stomach.
And she said she could never shake that.
And at that point, I was a teenager, so I had the context.
I understood, to a degree, death and violence.
But to hear her talking about what those days were like gave me a little bit of indication of what my grandfather's loss meant to everybody and how it still haunted them.
You described a little bit what it was like as a black man covering crime, especially on the local level.
I mean, first off, can you describe what it's like to cover crime as a black journalist in these cities and towns where, almost every day, depending on what part of the country you're in, you could be covering a death that was caused by guns?
Being a black reporter covering what can feel like an endless stream of black death.
You know it's a lot of pressure.
Because, on one hand, you know you want to do a good job, especially as a young reporter trying to, like you know, prove yourself that you've got what it takes to do this.
Very tough work, very stressful work.
But then you get to these crime scenes.
And oftentimes you're in communities that look like yours or you're seeing people that look like people you know.
And you have to wrestle with that, seeing yourself in some ways repeatedly gunned down, repeat your, your body, repeatedly fallen tears for your death, over and over and over again.
And the actual process of gathering um The information for your report is also tough because you have to ask dumb questions.
What did you see?
What did you hear?
What was it like the last time you talked to him?
Questions that are intrusive and at the worst moment in someone's life.
And then you're asking for a picture, right?
And then you're over there talking to the police.
And there's something exploitive there.
By nature, right?
I'm getting so much more out of this than you are, right?
But I always wanted to do it humanely and with great respect.
And then you have to take that back to the newsroom.
And I literally had an editor once.
It was after a shooting and one young person was killed and I think another one was wounded.
And he said, oh, that's just a garden variety killing.
He described the killing of a young teenager.
And mind you, we don't have any context to the situation.
We don't have any facts.
We don't know how, why, who.
We don't know anything.
But this was so routine that it wasn't worth covering.
No worry about it.
It's garden variety.
I mean hearing that story.
It just makes me think about how, as journalists, we're taught to be objective.
But objectivity, as it's often defined, asks us to almost be anthropological about the communities we cover.
And I wanted to know how you navigated the tension around that, around what objectivity is supposed to look like, especially as a Black man, covering gun violence, a subject that you had already intimately known through your own family experience.
The kind of objectivity that we're so often taught in this practice is a blindness.
It's like a convenient ignoring of what you actually see.
I think what's more appropriate is fairness, right?
And that objectivity, in that notion, it's an arm's length from your subject matter.
And I never fully believed in that part.
I think that you have to have your facts right.
I think you have to be fair to people on as many sides as there are.
But the notion of objectivity never rang solid for me.
What I managed to do, and I hope I continue to do, in putting shape to the experiences of people is going to the people and telling their story as openly and honestly as possible and painting the picture and bringing people into their experiences.
And even when it's painful, giving a little bit of that pain for everybody to hold.
Hold a little of this.
If she has to hold some, you have to hold some, too.
That's that's always how I moved.
And so I was able to maneuver and navigate some of this by always going to the people first.
I was a community first reporter.
Right.
Because the police will tell you one thing and they have their interest.
The politicians will have their interest.
But the people's interest.
Right.
That's often ignored.
And so for me, in illuminating these stories and in some ways illuminating my own right, it was to go in there and just paint the picture and censor them.
Center the people first.
And then everything else, I think, can feel more virtuous, even when it's a dirty game.
Even when you have to go back to the newsroom and hear the comments and or people ask.
I can remember so many times when people would come to me asking me if I recognize a particular gang sign or that kind of fully like what do I know about a gang?
What do I know?
Right.
You have to deal with all those micro and macro aggressions, or people who are willfully, conveniently ignorant, or those who look at black people and black communities and low income communities diversively.
And so sometimes these communities are either hyper-covered for the sensationalism around the violence or totally ignored.
There's this thing that can happen when you're a Black reporter covering communities of color.
You talked about the process of covering crime being extractive, but for the families that you write about, they can sometimes express a kind of relief in being able to share their stories to you because they feel seen, because they're.
They felt ignored by law enforcement or mischaracterized by the media in the past.
And so there's this expectation that you might actually tell the truth.
So there's this intimacy there.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
You touched on it a bit about the ways that you relate to the people that you cover.
But that added expectation, it's part of the work.
That is an added I don't want to say burden, but it's an added truth to the work that you do.
Even in the toughest moments and the toughest stories, there's nothing like, to your point, that moment when a subject, someone you're talking to and getting their story kind of exhales because they feel safe, right.
Right.
In me.
They know they have someone that will.
Again, it's not put your hand on the scale, but will portray them honestly because they see that I care about them.
And I do, and I don't think that makes me biased.
I care about the way people are portrayed and the way they experience our world and our communities and all the systems that guide us.
And so there is this special thing, but that closeness also is part of, I think, the heft of what I think was bearing down on me.
There was this string of killings, starting with, like, Trayvon Martin on.
And I got close enough to the families where they trusted me to tell their stories.
In the middle of all the noise, I had a direct line to most of these families.
And the look in a mother's eyes in particular who has lost a son to murder or violence.
It's like nothing you've ever seen.
And I still see those eyes.
And I've never been able to remove Those eyes, right?
The pain that you see in them, the ocean of emotion welling up in them.
And that, no matter what we do, all the humanizing, all of the, you know, making sense of the systems and the police and the law, and all those things will not bring their child back.
It's so indescribable that you kind of write in the book that you Avoid it.
Like you try to avoid the gaze.
If you're with a mom and a dad that has lost a child to gun violence, you kind of gravitate towards the father.
I've tried.
Sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
But with the fathers, you know what?
As men, we're great at hiding pain.
We're great at numbing pain.
And we're great at pretending.
It's not that, especially as black men, that we don't feel the pain.
But we know that any chip in our armor, any bit of weakness can sink you.
And so we're good.
And also we want to be strong and solid and sturdy for everyone else.
And I would see that time and again with these fathers, fathers who often would be erased from the entire picture.
But I was talking to these guys.
And so I knew the pain that they were going through.
I knew the pressure they were trying to apply to the police departments or whatever body was investigating their child's death.
I saw it.
And so part of me wanted to make sure that, as black men, we're so often marginalized and so often invisible, rendered invisible um, in these spaces, that it also felt like let me also show you that black men are here in our communities and do care about our children again um, hating to have to do it, but show them that we are also like any other man who, any other father, that we are there too.
When you say intentionally erased, what do you mean?
Can you give me an example of that?
I think a lot of the storylines, especially with some of the killings by police, is that these kids were just products of these single mother households, just like the rest of them in these places that have fostered a culture of violence, who have no respect for authority or law or themselves.
And it all starts in the home, right?
But black men, as many of us know, as the reports show over index in participation in their children's lives.
Right.
And so I think it's a convenient narrative that these boys came from this place.
So allowing people to make some assumptions about how they might be behaving and also accepting that this is a product of those circumstances.
And I think that's what you know the pretending comes into play or intentional erasure comes into play.
One of the things that you do in the book Tremaine is focus on many major cities, including Chicago.
And as we know, President Trump has so often used Chicago as a symbol.
He's even threatened to send in the National Guard to make this broader political point about crime in America.
What do you think gets lost when talking about the gun violence in Chicago?
Hearing the president talk about Chicago and Baltimore and other cities and he goes on to talk about how people in these communities were born to be criminal.
The violence is innate, right?
There's something in these people that makes them inherently violent, and the gun is just their tool.
But I think one of the biggest things that people miss or don't fully understand is that there is a direct pipeline from a slew of places with super lax gun laws that are poured right into Chicago and that every one of these guns starts legally.
And so, along the pipeline from the factory to the wholesale market, to the retail market, to stores, to gun shows, there are all these places where guns are siphoned off by the so-called good guys with guns.
And so, while there is violence in Chicago and there is criminality in Chicago, there's criminality that happens long before then to allow these guns to pour into these cities, in ecosystems and environments already twist and bound by so much systemic violence and so much lack and so much hunger right and so much trauma that folks are carrying.
And so I think that's the part, understanding that none of these guns are coming from these places.
None of these guns are coming from these communities in Chicago.
I think that's the big one.
You know I was thinking about how, in many ways, this book is almost an answer to that unspoken or problematic term black on black crime, you know which it's kind of often used politically to deflect from these larger systemic issues that you're talking about.
And I wonder your relationship to that term, black on black crime.
And also, like when you first started reporting, how did you navigate that within yourself?
Within newsrooms, because I'm pretty sure you heard it, you know, within newsrooms.
The most logical response to this fallacy of black on black crime is that people lash out and people commit crimes against those they're close to, they're in proximity to geographically.
And so when you look at the numbers of white people who kill other white people, it's upward of 80, 90 percent.
Right.
And white people make up about 45 percent of the homicides in this country.
And most of them are killed by white people.
And so it's a fallacy, the idea of the special kind of, you know, black violence or crime.
It is, I believe, a response to the systemic pressures put on people.
People cordoned off in some of these neighborhoods long ago through segregation, through redlining.
And so I think the easiest way that we've been able to talk about this in media is pointing to the fact that people kill who they're close to.
Our guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tremaine Lee, and we're talking about his new book, A Thousand Ways to Die.
We'll be right back after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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You try to put a monetary cost on this as well.
One of the surprising or maybe not surprising costs are medical costs.
You found this out by covering this case of a young victim of gun violence.
His name was Kevin.
I think you actually say that like the story of Kevin is actually embedded in you now.
What is it about that story that that really sticks with you?
When I was just an intern in Philly at the Philadelphia Daily News back in 2003, I heard of a young man who was shot in southwest Philly.
A group of teenagers was trying to rob him for his Allen Iverson jersey.
And in doing so, they shot him in the back of the neck.
And when I finally made it to this young man whose name was Kevin Kevin Johnson, I made it to his hospital room.
And I expected to find a young man completely broken by that bullet, completely shattered.
And what I found was partly true.
He was rendered a quadriplegic.
So his body, his spine was shattered.
But there was this buoyancy about Kevin.
And he had this huge smile.
And I loved the front page picture that we used was his big old smile.
And it was just like it would bring joy to your face seeing the smile.
But what he told me was even brighter than that, brighter than his smile.
He talked about his dreams of walking one day and that he would make it through this and his literal dreams of him playing basketball and that he could feel every single sensation of playing basketball.
And he believed it.
And I looked across his bed and found his mother's eyes, those mother's eyes again.
Filled with the harshest reality that she and I both knew that he would never walk again.
He would never feel any of those sensations again.
She started going through this list of costs that it would take to get him home not to keep him alive, just to get him home.
And it was a super expensive special wheelchair.
It was a new van to move that wheelchair around.
It was a new ramp on their North Philly row home to get the wheelchair into the house.
It was a widening of the doors to get him in and out.
It was a new outlet and receptacles for his breathing machine to keep him alive.
And then there was the medication.
And then there were all these costs that that family had to pay for that one single bullet, a bullet that cost cents to make.
He passed away, and the family was left with tremendous debt.
Yeah.
So I've never forgotten.
The story changed as I widened the aperture on what violence is.
But Kevin's story and his face and that big old smile has never left me and it's the true reason this book exists.
You spent a significant part of your childhood.
What was it, six years at the Milton Hershey School?
And for those who don't know, it's a boarding school known for providing children from low-income backgrounds with a fully funded education.
How did you end up there, and can you describe it?
Yeah, I have a lot of love for the Milton Hershey School.
So I went in seventh grade in 1990, and it was a time where my stepfather had been incarcerated.
And I was just starting to get into a little trouble again.
Fighting and always a good student right.
Gifted and talented, great grades.
But I was quick to fight if the situation called for it.
I was more than willing to engage.
Um, but my mom saw me, uh, the great promise and she didn't want to lose me.
And she wanted to make sure that I was in position um to experience the fullness of my dreams and whatever was possible.
That's how she she, she's always tells me that when I was born, she's like you're the one, you're the one.
And she raised me to see myself as somebody.
And for me as a latchkey kid, meaning I came home and I was by myself.
Usually there's food on the oven because my mom worked a late shift.
Um, My stepfather was, you know, a working addict.
So he was either working or somewhere doing what he did and having older siblings who were gone.
I was, I spent a lot of time by myself.
And so getting to the Milton Hershey school, it was a culture shock, but it was amazing that like everything was free, from medical to dental, to your clothes.
And it was just like everywhere you turn, there was an opportunity to grow and learn.
And I remember being in seventh grade and now I'm part of the the model airplane club and we're building model airplanes and flying them and it's like it was an amazing experience.
An amazing experience, but you did a really foolish thing while you were there um, and i'm gonna have you tell the story, but i'm gonna set it up.
So one day during a trip to walmart, you brought some silver toy handguns and brought them back to school.
Hearing it now, it doesn't sound like a great idea.
Well, the mother in me was screaming like, what were you thinking?
So what grade were you in about this time?
So I would have been in 10th grade.
And so I'm, you know, 13, 14, somewhere around that age.
And so I go to the store and I see these chrome toy handguns.
And they're like heavy, little .22s.
And for some reason, and this is the time of...
You know, gangster rap, and we had our hoodies, and it was just a time, a time.
And they looked really cool.
And so me and a bunch of my buddies, you know, said well, when we get these guns, we'll get some Jason masks from the Friday the 13th movies, the hockey mask, some hoodies, and we'll just be like these menacing figures for Halloween.
The Halloween dance was coming up.
And so we get these guns, and soon after we get them, like, the trouble begins, right?
There's people complaining in the hallways that people had these guns.
One kid, you know, took some money from another kid in the bathroom with the gun.
It was just like getting out of hand.
We had a football game and I was in the football team and a buddy of mine who had one of these fake guns.
The principal, the coach came in, quickly ushered him out and he was suspended indefinitely.
My gun happened to be back in my student home and one of my best friends to this day big shout out to Bernard, my brother to this day went and tossed it out of the window before they searched my room.
We had a game against a neighboring team in a city, Harrisburg, and their concern was what if someone sees this fake gun and mistakes it for a real one?
It makes total sense.
It makes total sense.
Do you think about what might have happened if that had been found in your room?
I think one if it had been found in my room and I could have been kicked out of the school, which would have been earth-shattering.
What if things didn't get out of control early and we had taken the gun somewhere, been playing around and got shot?
I can't help but think about how Tamir Rice's life was taken with a toy gun and zealous police officers who gunned the little boy down.
And so I think about it often.
It's a silly close call that could have just changed The entire course of my life.
Am I right in that you covered Tamir Rice?
I did cover Tamir Rice.
I can only imagine that this story came up for you, this memory of your own close call.
How that could have been you.
You know, honestly, it really didn't.
It wasn't the gun incident back in school.
It was his chubby face that reminded me of my chubby face in seventh grade when I was 12 years old.
And I saw in him myself and he never had the opportunity to grow tall and lean out and fill in his his young manhood and have the fun that I did and fall into my studies the way I did and get a career that I love and tell stories of community and be proud to do that and see the pride in other people as I'm doing that.
He never got the chance to do that.
And when I saw his face, he's such a boy.
And so often black boys are mistaken for men because of the fear that others have of us.
There's no you look at that boy or you look at Trayvon Martin, his narrow shoulders.
That's no man.
But they're treated like men and black men aren't treated kindly.
And so that's what I saw in covering that case.
For a moment, I forgot all the little minutia of my own life.
I saw the big picture of like, man, look at his face.
Look at him.
And now that boy is dead.
Let's take a short break.
If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Tremaine Lee.
We're talking about his new book A Thousand Ways to Die, which examines the human cost of gun violence.
This is Fresh Air.
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You know, Tremaine.
You've probably covered thousands of these daily counts of violence throughout your career.
You know the day-to-day stories.
And then you've covered some of the big stories that made national headlines Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin.
You're actually credited with bringing national attention to that case.
Michael Brown in Ferguson, the Buffalo supermarket shooting where several people were shot and killed for being black.
And there was that time period 2019 2020, you know, after George Floyd was murdered, where there seemed to be an acknowledgement to the problem of gun violence, of continued racism in our country.
And five years later, we're here.
We're in a very different time.
And as a journalist, as a Black person, how are you processing this moment?
In the last few years, in consecutive years, each year there have been more police killings than ever recorded in this country.
We're seeing records still of the most people across the country killed by police.
There was that moment after George Floyd was killed, and we saw this worldwide movement of And finally, a coalition that looked like America standing up to say enough is enough.
Right.
Enough was enough of the violence, of the killing and the disparities in the ways in which we are killed and in which we die.
And then time went on and slowly the crowd started looking less like that diverse American body.
And it's back to black women and black men and black queer people you know doing.
What they always have is standing up when no one else was there around.
And I think part of the problem is and why I try to make sense of this if there is any making sense of this is the idea that systems are bigger than individuals.
It's bigger than movements, the systems.
Because as folks are marching, black men still weren't getting employed at equal rates.
They still weren't getting into colleges at equal rates.
The school-to-prison pipeline was still functioning.
What we got was corporations pledging money that they never delivered, some perhaps never intended to.
And the moment that there is this new administration and they have the opportunity to do away with any effort, regardless of what you put the name, whatever name you want to put on it.
The moment they had the opportunity to not fulfill those promises, they did so.
And now many of those corporations, their leaders are lining up to kiss the ring.
Right.
As there's this attack on not just the black history, not just the programs aimed at alleviating somebody inequity.
Right.
But people themselves.
And it's terribly sad because we have an opportunity and we still have this opportunity to be the great nation that we've professed to be right.
A great nation would say, look how far we've come.
Look what we used to do.
And look how we treat each other now.
Look how we've created opportunities for all of us to stand on equal footing.
Instead, what we see is the convulsing of an insecure nation.
That's what we're seeing, an insecure racist nation.
That's what we're seeing.
But there's an opportunity because there are good people in this country.
I wouldn't be true if I didn't say so much of what you wrote here.
I understand and experience.
I was a crime and courts reporter for many, many years, and I carry those stories with me.
I carry my own stories about gun violence growing up in Detroit.
And so this is deeply meaningful for me to read, for you to put these words on paper.
And what a time for this book to come out.
What do you want people to take away from this book?
I want Black people in particular to walk away from this book, knowing that ain't nothing wrong with you, right?
There's nothing violent within you.
That the true violence are the systems that have guided us to this moment.
And I want white people and I want general readers To understand that there are systems that collude against our livelihoods.
And it's not, we can't project this criminality and this violence on groups of people.
We can't.
So it's kind of trying to understand.
But in this moment where people are looking for answers and people don't understand how we got here, I hope this book helps.
Because if we can illuminate some of the issues and some of the systems, then maybe we can tinker at the edges and then we can get to the root and then we can start dismantling some of these violent systems that end so much life.
I hope that's what folks walk away from.
Tremaine Lee, thank you so much for this conversation, and thank you for this book.
Thank you, Tanya, for having me.
It means a lot.
Tremaine Lee's new book is A Thousand Ways to Die The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America.
Coming up, our jazz historian Kevin Whitehead reviews a new anthology from Joni Mitchell.
This is Fresh Air.
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A new anthology of recordings by composer singer guitarist, pianist and painter Joni Mitchell is called Joni's Jazz.
She's pictured on the cover alongside Friends and Star collaborators Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock.
Fresh Air's jazz historian, Kevin Whitehead, says of all the songsters who passed through the 1960s folk scene, Mitchell has been the biggest influence on jazz singers and she has the deepest jazz connections.
She plants her garden in the spring.
He does the winter shoveling.
Now there's three of them laughing round the radio.
She says, I'm leaving here.
Joni Mitchell and saxophonist Wayne Shorter with pianist Herbie Hancock in 2007 on The Tea Leaf Prophecy, a song about her parents.
It's from the 61-track Mitchell-curated chronologically scrambled anthology Joni's Jazz, exploring her interactions with jazz musicians and influences.
Mitchell and Hancock contribute short essays, but the set could use more extensive notes, considering a few tracks have no evident jazz connection.
You might wonder why the set kicks off with blue for Mitchell's solo.
If you didn't know, her short vocal intro was inspired by Miles Davis's muted trumpet.
Joni Mitchell says that as a singer, she learned more from Miles than anybody.
Growing up on the Canadian prairies, she heard his LPs Sketches of Spain and Kinda Blue, which informed her expansive sense of harmony.
She also heard the vocal trio Lambert, Hendrix and Ross with their tongue-twisting settings of bebop horn solos gymnastics that'd leave a mark on her own timing.
Mitchell covered Annie Ross' feature Twisted on the album Court and Spark.
They all look at angry young men, They all look at Edison and also at Einstein.
So why should I feel sorry if they just couldn't understand The idiomatic logic that went on in my head?
Young Joni Mitchell sang and wrote poetry, so she started out in folk music, because that's where poets like Dylan and Leonard Cohen were.
Songwriters edit words to fit the tune, but as Mitchell's verse got more complex, her melodies and rhythms began to follow the words, as in a classical art song.
She'd already been tuning her guitar various ways to facilitate the unstable chords she heard in her head.
So to follow her edgy moves, she started using jazz musicians, studio players who moonlighted in pop jazz bands the Crusaders and LA Express.
Things really got rolling in 1976 when she hired the fretless bass guitar whiz from the jazz rock band Weather Report.
Jaco Pastorius, with his burping tone and sliding pitches, was as slippery as she was.
Give me such pleasure, You bring me such pain In our best of grace.
Then, in 1978, came Joni Mitchell's most famous jazz encounter, putting lyrics to new and old melodies by the dying bassist Charles Mingus.
Jaco Pastorius's electric bass was all wrong for that project, but Joni and Jaco had their own mojo going and in the end she had to do it her way, just as Mingus would have.
Her album Mingus was uneven.
Only three tracks appear on Joni's jazz.
The best number dry cleaner from Des Moines is the least Mingus-y sounding with horns arranged by Jaco.
Mitchell's virtuoso vocal is wide-ranging and rhythmically precise, even if you don't catch every word through lyrics about a tourist in Vegas on a lucky streak.
¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶
Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone, Joni Mitchell's ally ever after.
She'd bring him in toward the end of the recording process to dub in commentary at the margins.
They'd discuss what he might play in terms of metaphors.
For one spot.
She told him come in like you're super sad and go out like you're really young on a bird that whistles.
Shorter peeps in the background till the ending when he expands into a whole flock of wanes.
¶¶ ¶¶
In truth, Wayne Shorter could be as underused on Joni Mitchell sessions as he often was in Weather Report, but her music's not about the solos.
It's not, she said, like I'm trying to do jazz and getting it wrong.
Still, when she stopped writing for a while, circa 2000, she recorded standards with a lush orchestra, echoing late-period Billie Holiday, another singer whose range narrowed but could still phrase a lyric.
On Come's Love, Mitchell lags behind the beat, then races to catch up, an old Bob Dylan move.
But here she sounds more like a jazz singer than ever in the lineage somewhere between Hollywood's Julie London and Joanie fan, Cassandra Wilson.
It isn't any use, You'll just start sliding When your heart turns on the juice.
Comes a heatwave It can hurry to the shore.
Comes a summer breeze, For all the jazzy touches.
In the studio, Joni Mitchell assembled her music like a pop artist, layer by layer.
She's also a lifelong painter, so she's thinking about surface and background textures and maybe a wash of sound streaking one corner.
So you may get, say, Wayne Shorter's soprano sax overpainting pedal steel guitar.
That orchestral comes love.
Makes oblique reference to Duke Ellington, celebrated for making music beyond category.
That goes for Joni Mitchell too.
Jazz, art songs, pop and folk traditions all feed her sound, but her fluid, airy songs are distinctly hers.
And with her cool-headed outsidery appraisal of so many North American traditions, she's distinctly Canadian as well.
They were laughing, they were dancing in the rain.
They knew their love was a strong one when they heard the far-off whistle of a train.
They were hoping it was gonna be a long run Cause oh oh, my my, When that train comes rolling by, No paper thin walls, no folks, about No one else can hear The crazy cries of love.
Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead reviewed Joni's Jazz by Joni Mitchell.
Tomorrow on Fresh Air some remarkable things about your body and ways some malfunctioning body parts can be replaced.
We talk with Mary Roach.
Her new book, Replaceable You is about research into transplanting organs, why a pig organ donor is better than a goat, regenerating cells, prosthetic legs and feet and more.
I hope you can join us.
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