Definitely one of the all time greats. My only regret is that I was not into her pre Court & Spark, which is the first I heard of her besides Big Yellow Taxi. The artistic jump she made from her her folky mainly acoustic work to the sophisticated quasi jazz is in credible and IMHO opinion is even more iconoclastic than when Dylan went electric. Listening to For the Roses and then Court & Spark is like night and day. Yes there are some horns and flutes on Roses and the outro of Blond In The Bleachers give hints but it must have blown her fans minds when Court and Spark came out.

My all time fave is The Hissing Of Summer Lawns which could have been sub titled Joni Mitchell meets Carl Jung. Her lyrical perfection went up a notch with album which highlighted and chastised the American dream. Exposing its decadence and dark side. She had touched on this theme before on her Ladies Of The canyon album but here she hit the bulls eye. Equally important is the development of her music as well, which, using Court & Spark as a launching pad, went all over the map. From world music (pre Talking Heads, Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel)to even more sophisticated chords and melodies approaching and sometimes surpassing the work of Steely Dan.

Hejira, her next release is my second favorite. On here she did an about face from the jazz influence and went back to her singer songwriter mode. In some respects this could be seen as Blue revisited. But far from being a sequel this album came with a twist in the person of bassist extraordinaire Jaco Pastorious.I was (and still am) deep into Weather Report and while Jaco held his own playing besides the legendary Wayne Shorter and Josef Zawinul playing along side Joni, he did things he never did with WR.

As the Arabic word translates Hejira was about her migration and travels to simultaneously flee from and find herself, after a broken romance. It is a dark and moody album and perfect to play on a rainy Saturday night.

Joni's self indulgent album (as all great artists have done with various degrees of success or failure) was Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. It is a car wreck of an album mainly because it was a double and she really didn't have enough material for that. With that being said, the title track and the magnificent Paprika Plains and Dreamland (with yes Chaka Khan) make it worth your while.

Her most adventurous is the album she did with the legendary Charles Mingus. While it could be said that she was just dabbling and teasing with jazz, with this album she was pushed in the pool. Backed by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Jaco and WR drummer Peter Erskine she wrote lyrics to four songs he wrote and added to lyrics to his classic Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. What makes this record a strange curio are the two songs she wrote. God Must Be A Boogie Man which Jaco burns and The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey which comes complete with a wolves choir.

After that she was poised to make another collaboration album Wild Things Run Fast, this time with The Police but they were not able to do it, so she recorded with other musicians. I did not learn this until years after I heard it. Then it all made sense. This is arguably her last great album. Subsequent albums still showed flashes of brilliance, such as Chalk Mark In A Rain Storms "The Beat Of Black Wings" and Dog Eat Dog (an album with Thomas Dolby) "Ethiopia."

She then returned to reinventing her older work with the orchestral Travelogue and singing the classics ala Linda Ronstadt on Both Sides Now.