Joni Mitchell was an unlikely superstar for a few years in the
1970’s. She was prickly, uncompromising, and very successful. Her
preference for difficult music and jazzy experimentations put an end to
her fling with superstardom and that was fine by me.
Like Don Van Vliet last week, Joni is a talented painter who did the cover art for many of her releases including 1979’s Mingus:
It was surprisingly hard to find the *other* paintings used on Mingus on the interwebs in their LP format but I found them as Jpegs, so here we go. This is a portrait of Charles Mingus by Joni from inside the LP’s gatefold:
Here’s a portrait of the ailing Mingus that was used on the back cover of the LP:
Here’s Joni’s take on Mingus’ classic tune about saxophone God, Lester Young: