MUSIC OF JONI MITCHELL SEEN AS A NATURAL FIT FOR MODERN THEATRICAL REIMAGINING
It’s happened to all of us — music from before our time has come into our lives and changed everything.
Usually the regular route is a new friend or an older sibling who turns us on to their soundtrack, and suddenly we are not just marching to a different drummer but we are dancing and singing along, too.
A few years ago, musicians Andrew Cohen and Anna Kuman had their musical discovery moment when they locked in to the music of the Joni Mitchell, arguably the most influential female recording artist of the late 20th century.
The 73-year-old Fort Macleod, Alta-born singer-songwriter’s catalogue inspired the pair to create Circle Game: Reimagining the Music of Joni Mitchell.
The show takes 29 of Mitchell’s songs and re-imagines them in a modern way. The show is 90 minutes long, and will be delivered by multi instrumentalists and singers Rowen Kahn, Scott Perrie, Adriana Ravalli, Kimmy Choi, Sara Vickruck and David Z. Cohen.
“It all started for us in 2013. It was the year of Joni’s 70th birthday,” said Kuman.
“There was a lot of press about her and her contribution to the Canadian and international music industry. We started hearing her music everywhere we went, so we started researching a little bit more and we found the poetry of her lyrics was incredibly poignant and relevant to the struggles our generation was currently going through,” said Kuman who, like Cohen and other millennials, had heard Mitchell’s songs and covers of them over the years thanks mostly to their parents.
“There is a movement of people right now searching through thrift stores and kind of upcycling, and I feel like good music is one of those things that will always stand the test of time,” said Kuman.
“There’s always going to be future generations that go back and do that research and look and learn, and that’s how music evolves.”
For the project the pair asked themselves what if Mitchell was writing songs like Chelsea Morning, Big Yellow Taxi, Fiddle and the Drum, Both Sides Now, California and Circle Game, in 2017?
“It kind of came naturally,” said Kuman about listening to Mitchell with a contemporary, pop ear.
The next step was workshopping the show at Kuman’s alma mater Capilano University.
“We like the word ‘reimagined’,” said Cohen.
“Our aim was to run the gamut of Top 40 (music) today. We wanted to focus on different genres.” Don’t worry, there’s no auto-tuning.
Kuman and Cohen’s partnership extends beyond work — they have been married for a couple of years. The decision to create a new show meant they always took their work home, and everywhere else, too.
“We talked about it all the time,” laughed Kuman. “For our honeymoon (in 2015) we backpacked for four months across Asia. We had our notebooks wherever we went.
“It’s about opening people’s minds to the message, and that’s what we were trying to do by making these new arrangements. Leave all your previous conceptions of her music at the door,” said Kuman.
“Leave the perception that it is your parents’s music at the door. Come in and listen to the message that’s being told.”