Details
Track Listing
1. Harlem in Havana
2. Man From Mars
3. Love Puts on a New Face
4. Lead Balloon
5. No Apologies
6. Taming the Tiger
7. Crazy Cries of Love, The
8. Stay in Touch
9. Face Lift
10. My Best to You
11. Tiger Bones
Album Notes
Personnel: Joni Mitchell (vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion); Femi Jiya (spoken vocals); Michael Landau (guitar); Greg Leisz (pedal steel guitar); Wayne Shorter (saxophone); Larry Klein (bass); Brian Blade (drums).
Engineers include: Femi Jiya, Dan Marnien, Tony Phillips.
Arguably Mitchell's best studio recording since MINGUS, TAMING THE TIGER picks up where TURBULENT INDIGO left off, but there's a notable progression, both musical and lyrical. The biggest reason may be Mitchell's grasping of the production reins. Gone are the slick excesses of bassist Larry Klein's production. TAMING THE TIGER achieves a unity of vision, a fact that also owes to the arrangements' focus on Mitchell's own guitar and synthesizer work. The recurrent sonic texture here is an almost Zawinul-esque tapestry of electronic sounds; silvery synth and guitar-synth form an attractive latticework over which Mitchell lays her jazzy, unpredictable vocal melodies.
Though she's grown a bit crankier as she's gotten older, when she lambasts contemporary pop culture (the title track) and attacks Victorian mores ("Face Lift") she doesn't come off as curmudgeonly as she did on the diatribes of her previous album. There's an airiness and joy to TAMING THE TIGER that had been missing in Mitchell's music for a long time. Even the most cerebral tunes have a winning lightness.
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