#joni-mitchell

#joni-mitchell

Ora Cogan makes songs the way diviners cast charms. Her music moves on instinct but carries the deliberation of ritual, each gesture placed where feeling cuts closest to the bone. On Hardhearted Woman, her ninth album and debut for Sacred Bones, she casts an invocation for anyone determined to remain wild in a world where it's easier to calcify.

Much has been mythologised about Laurel Canyon in the 1970s, the loose hillside network of rented houses, recording studios, informal salons and open doors in the hidden in the Hollywood Hills. Musicians, artists and writers moving between kitchens, gardens and living rooms - stars like Joni Mitchell, The Byrds, The Doors, Frank Zappa are said to have played songs for one another, partied, took drugs and slept with each other, living freely while writing the music we still listen to today.

I had to make a transition for survival from folk music, which was killed by the British Invasion. David Crosby was afraid that they were going to slap some kind of band on me and that it would ruin my music. So I made that record with voice and guitar. Then the record company sicced the band on me. It was called The Section, they were a good band for James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, but they couldn't play my music.

When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche's avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn't coexist with a campaigner's political urgency on environmental and social issues.

He sings the names of the dead haltingly, as though he is reading them off a screen-which, judging from the recording-studio footage in the song's lyric video, he probably is. The song is about the news, but it is also, perhaps unintentionally, about the moment of lag when we absorb the names and images, when we try to assimilate atrocity into narrative.