Joni Mitchell – Don Juan's Reckless Daughter

In 1977, while most of her contemporaries seemed to be on auto-pilot, Joni Mitchell was delving deeper into jazz and Afro-Latin/Brazilian music, and chiseling a half-hour piano improvisation into an epic side-long orchestral suite. Almost no one of her status in mainstream pop music was taking these kinds of artistic risks at the time. This album was a brave, ambitious undertaking. Critics trashed it, jazz people snubbed her as a dabbler, and many of her fans were befuddled. But what's a creative artist to do? Stick to a successful formula, or continue challenging herself? Sure, this album has its flaws, but there's still a lot of good music to be found here. And even if you don't like the more experimental "Paprika Plains" (I do) or the long percussion jams, the rest of these songs are a perfectly logical extension of what she'd done on "Hejira" and/or a foreshadowing of what was to come on "Mingus".