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Olga Konkova  It’s coming on Christmas On this new CD from Caprice – the fourth in their Improvisational series – the rather unknown (except in the industry) – but prolific – modern pianist Olga Konkova, improvises on a selection of Joni Mitchell songs.
The other night, after just receiving this Caprice CD in the mail, I went out on my usual training bicycle round of 30 kilometers, which I do each night after work, even in the heavy darkness of December, if the weather isn’t completely forbidding. After a few kilometers it started drizzling, but I continued in the cone of light from my Silva headlamp attached to my helmet, along the asphalt country roads winding through the dark coniferous forests of these parts of Scandinavia, dressed in technical sports wear that withstand the cold very good and the rain reasonably – while I let Joni Mitchell’s album Blue flow at the speed of my average 30 km/h through my iPod headphones, keeping an eye out for moose, wild boars, deer, foxes, badgers and hares that might cross the road, especially since I move silently; just a ball of light through the dark! Yes, the Mitchell album of choice this dark and wet forest night was Blue from 1971; a truly legendary and through and through magical and breathlessly inspiring collection of songs, which might even have been the inspiration for Dylan’s incredible 1975 song Tangled Up In Blue. My reason for choosing Blue for this night’s rainy ride was that no fewer than four of Olga Konkova’s piano improvisations originate on Blue: River; California; A Case Of You and Little Green. Konkova gave me a good reason – though I don’t really need one! – to sift through some of my Joni Mitchell albums with a fresh ear, listening for perhaps something else than usual, finding the connection to Konkova’s fingerings and chords on her grand; investigating her ways in and out of the delicate harmonies and the spiritual atmospheres of the sprawling vocal commentaries on a situation on this “marbled bowling ball”, which, in these days of the Climate Conference in Copenhagen appears ever more vulnerable… but as long as people think they are living on the planet, no change will come; not until we all understand that we don’t live on the planet, but that we ARE the planet, will enlightenment make us change, from within. (Those who don’t understand what I say will have to think about it, and those who know what I say feel it in the air these days). Perhaps I should remind the reader how these Improvisational endeavors come about. The sets are recorded in the dead of night, at a concert hall in downtown Stockholm, in the presence of just two people, the pianist and her sound technician – and the technician retreats to the control room when the pianist improvises on the Steinway D grand. Olga Konkova has chosen to start with one of the intimate and heartfelt songs of the album Blue (1971); River, from which I have quoted at the outset of this text. She starts with a couple of high notes, which break into a heavy, resounding, almost Rachmaninovean chord progression, until I hear, remotely, Joni Mitchell’s tune inside the grand, in a shadow play through which I recall the poetry – I wish I had a river, that I could skate away on – and I see in my mind a painting from 1565 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525 [circa] – 1569)
I also come to think of my friend Hildegard, a linguist from Antwerp, whom I met while hiking Swedish Lapland, and who enjoys the outdoors very much, and whom I appreciate deeply as one of the rare new friends of old age. And this is the way music might affect you, if you let yourself be sensitive to the workings of it; reminiscences, dreams, faces and voices, cold air on your face, the might of a clear winter night with a star spangled dome of the sky instilling in you the insight that “it isn’t all for nothing, It’s not just written in the sand” (Robbie Robertson 1987: Fallen Angel). I’m so hard to handle, and sure enough, it always gets complicated, so why simplify it. This, also, is one of the properties of both Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan that I treasure; they’re intellectual decency, their artistic and human integrity, their refusal to cover up the rough edges of life, the hardships and the toil that come with all close relationships: “Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain” (Bob Dylan 1997: Not Dark Yet) So even through the calm swell at the surface of the shifting drift of Olga Konkova’s first improvisation on her new Caprice CD, I feel the tangled experiences of life, the way they haunt most of us, with unforeseen undercurrents and cold streaks that make you shiver, and finally – which is the essence of Konkova’s attitude in her playing here - her way to go about Joni Mitchell’s River with a kind of resolve, a way to come to grips, a method to come to terms with existence, audible in her few chords on a Steinway D grand in the dead of night...
Help me So here we are again, going down that road, and I feel the nervous shiver in every fraction of the tune, because inside it I sense Joni Mitchell’s voice, panicky and lustful, like an addict who knows the danger but looks for it, embracing it with voracious fervor. This song comes off of the album Court and Spark (1973), so Olga Konkova remains with the early Mitchell, although, by 1973, the queen of complex high-end lyrics and boundless melodic ingenuity had evolved fast and far, into much more sophistication, with fellow musicians like David Crosby and Graham Nash from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Robbie Robertson from The Band, and José Feliciano on one track. Olga lets the atmosphere of the song float like mist, holding back from some of the feverish rock n’ roll strumming of the Mitchell original; holding back from crying, rolling out some carpets of intertwined jazz and blues chords, strong enough to tread, but with a nauseating wobble. I love it! The “help me” slot, signaling that horny and expectant sensation; the lady getting into her high heel shoes and her red dress, moving towards an environment of glistening wine glasses and fumbling hands with perfect manicure; the whole event oozing with raw buttonless sex and physical ecstasy.
They paved paradise Big Yellow Taxi is one of Joni Mitchell’s original hits, and probably the one song that most people recognize; even those that aren’t aware of Joni Mitchell. It sits on the album Ladies of the Canyon (1970), which was released when Mitchell was 26. That album has a roughness about it, of the yet not properly polished diamond of an artist, and Big Yellow Taxi, apart from being an early environmental song with a cause, is a real swinger of a tune, rock n’ roll of a simplicity that yet gives some taste of the brewing sophistication soon to bloom. There were already songs on that album that could have fitted on Blue a year later, like especially Conversation. Olga Konkova has chosen to give her improvisation on Big Yellow Taxi a bluesy and more violently jazzy quirk, letting lose an array of bursting progressions up and down the keyboard of the Steinway D grand, sometimes even stooping away in force down a cartoon back alley march worthy of Fritz the Cat. It’s playful, funny and forceful, ending on a soft note. Here she plays like Jack Kerouac writes. Trina wears her wampum beads Ladies of the Canyon, of course, comes from the same 1970 album as the preceding song, apparently dealing with some hippie women of the hippies’ times; this particular song written in 1968, some of the lyrics – not quoted here – about the hippie woman Annie baking brownies stirring recollections in me of my dear late friend Dellaree, who came from California via work at Max’s Kansas City in New York City to Sweden in 1970, baking brownies for all of her friends, right in the hippiest of the hippie years, embroidering the secret word NORT on my blue manchester pants. Tripping presumptuously on her toes, in high heel shoes, Konkova steps into the Ladies’ (of the Canyon) room, where the ladies stand by themselves, side by side like race horses in their boxes, in front of large mirrors that mirror their apparitions and the barren glazed tile of the walls, clean water running out of the faucets: a puzzling combination of flesh and sanitation.
No regrets Coyote With a bow or a nod, keyboardwise, trice followed by a short phrase of calm pianistic diligence, Olga Konkova takes this steep song and lets it run slowly through her fingers, like an absentminded child at play in a timeless moment under the sun, wind whispering through the trees. The song Coyote comes from Joni Mitchell’s album Heijra (1976), when Mitchell indeed had reached a climax of her admired sophistication. Some of her most beautiful lyrics are found on Heijra, in songs like this one – Coyote – and Song for Sharon and Refuge of the Roads. Olga Konkova has had me hear this tune in another way now, through her ingenious and personal interpretation. I would never have though about Coyote this way, and I enjoy immensely being shown other ways of experiencing something familiar. Sitting in a park in Paris, France We’re back on wondrous 1971 album Blue, and one of the catchiest tunes there, California. Some of those lines deal with the peace talks that were held in Paris, to try to end the Vietnam War, the US version, but it took until 1975 before Nixon, who otherwise has such a bad reputation, ended the infamous war that the so respected John Kennedy once began… Olga Konkova’s improvisational interpretations of these well-known songs are very inventive and imaginative, usually kept at at least armlength’s distance from any obvious kinship with the torrential originals – but alert listening soon catches your attention and throws it in line with the signatures of recognition, though ever so discreetly, until you suddenly realize that you’re right there on top of a wave moving though the song you know so well. This is the way Konkova works – or dances! – through California, from Sacramento to San Diego! In California she applies a host of her methods of disguise and bewilderment, until applying that sudden kiss on your eyebrow, when you thought you were all alone; a playfulness with romance attached! Just before our love got lost you said Oh I am a lonely painter A Case of You is one of my favorites on this favorite album Blue, and it’s the third of four songs from that album appearing in Olga Konkova’s fragrant bouquet of improvisations on Joni Mitchell songs one night in a deserted concert hall in Stockholm, when this album called Improvisational four was cut. Olga cuts this song like one cuts a diamond; with sharp, shrill and steady movements of the instrument, to achieve that faceted gem of the sum of melody in velvet air, dancing a fairy’s dance above that dark and furious undercurrent that you sense in this melancholy interpretation, and that you also fear and worship in the toils of love; that ominous, threatening drift of dark Eros that can blow all cultural varnish to Kingdom come, like a roaring Krakatoa. I am almost moved to tears by Olga Konkova’s utterly disciplined, delicate and weary approach to this song, holding the volume down, emotions back, scattering the thoughtful tones sparsely across the canvas of this resigned portrait of love; a love in which you can feel, already at the outset, it’s unavoidable conclusion, the way my most wonderful lover Sirkka in a letter from Helsinki in the mid-1980s feared, only a few weeks after our fantastic love story had started: “All the while my feelings change. I mean, there are moments when I’m scared that it isn’t true that we’ve been together so wonderfully; that I will lose you now that I’ve met you; that the love between us soon will be no more than a few paragraphs in your diary. Ah, how can I say; I’m not one to be certain. It’s easy to say now, that better to live like this than to be careful all the time, but I’m so frightened that suffering will hide behind like a laughing ghost. Why?, my heart asks. You have said that you love me, and shown it too.” So recollections of a wondrous love story – the finest I’ve ever experienced - rise within me like holograms from infinity inside Olga Konkova’s masterly melancholy, ensuring me that there is much more to life than the presently obvious. He is three God Must Be A Boogie Man comes off Joni Mitchell’s 1979 album Mingus. It’s from a rather experimental phase of Mitchell’s career, with unguarded lyrics in a storm of heavily ambient guitar strumming and fat Jaco Pastorius bass lines. It’s no automatic or easy listening this time around, but arty jazz phrases flung far and wide, sprawling and straggling. It’s like Dylan throwing in an unprecedented If Dogs Run Free on his New Morning album from 1970; who’d expected that? And he didn’t go any further down that line, either; it was a one off situation. Konkova is back in the Ladies’ (of the Canyon) room (1970) again with the song Woodstock, and a funny synchronicity is that right before I sat down to continue this review tonight, they showed Pennebaker’s Woodstock movie on Swedish television (12 December 2009), and I who hardly ever watch television, spent that hour glued to the screen, watching Richie Havens, Arlo Guthrie in Dylan’s Walking Down the Line, Incredible String Band, Country Joe McDonald in anti-Vietnam War song I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die-Rag, Joan Baez etcetera.
I came upon a child of God Although Joni Mitchell never made it to Woodstock – as didn’t Dylan either – she wrote a wonderful and now classical song about it. Born with the moon in Cancer He went to California The final of Olga Konkova’s choices from Joni Mitchell’s album Blue is Green, which at least causally perceived seems to deal with a child born to two not quite ready, still very young parents, and the subsequent toils of a single parent. Olga goes about this ambivalent story with the utmost care and diligence, approaching it in simply put tones and chords, leaving a lot of space for reflection and reconciliation, on the verge, it seems, of resignation and even renunciation…, the latter conclusion perhaps colored in my mind by a phrase later on in Joni Mitchell’s text, talking about signing “all the papers in the family name”.
Downtown In France They Kiss On Main Street belongs on Joni Mitchell’s album The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (1975) – a speedy, dreamy, half-jazzy release with long, rambling texts. Olga Konkova chisels the initial bars in a true likeness of the original melody, cutting away any unnecessary embellishments from the outline of the tune, letting it slide slowly like a rosary through her hands. Or she may be a lady examining something at a flea market, where I watch her leaning over a box of items, while people move in impersonal, anonymous clusters up and down the sidewalk; true nobodies until you fall into conversation with one of them, which is when that anonymous figure is pulled out of the anonymity like an elementary particle being pulled out of the state of pure potential into a state we call existence, when it has to decide who to be, or where to be, before again falling back into it’s undecided potential. Isn’t that a way to view these improvisations too, like something that exists in it’s many-faceted potential, until a pianist – Olga Konkova – pulls it out of that potential and gives it a guise, a form, a way to be – which is the one – out of innumerable possibilities – that comes to life in our minds, in the binary prison – or exhibition? – of a compact disc! This improvisation, like some others on this CD – leans towards the inward, introspective state of mind, with some sprawling excursions into jazzland and back. To me this is a new way to see Joni Mitchell’s songs, which is quite rewarding.
Rows and flows of angel hair But now they only block the sun For the final track on Olga Konkova’s Caprice CD she has chosen (or maybe someone else chose these songs for her?) the well-known Both Sides Now from the album Clouds (1973). Olga Konkova lets this quite wonderful improvisational CD end on a tender, introspective and somewhat melancholy note, reflecting, as it appears to me, on the spiritual content of the song; the insight that we live a shadow play of illusions and mirages in this human existence of hope and fear, and that we will fool ourselves as long as we can’t get past that state into enlightenment, and get rid of our everyday grasping at unreal things and circumstances. In the mild gaze of this reflective song, which fondles the listener and removes one tear or other from a cheek, I conclude my thoughts on Olga Konkova’s masterly and sometimes completely unexpected – and therefore mind-expanding – improvisational exploration of the songs of Joni Mitchell.
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