Joni Mitchell had spent her career up to 1973 being a folkie’s folkie – the kind of songwriter that other artists were compelled to cover, the folk singer of her generation. From the coffee shops of Calgary to the genre-defining mastery of 1971’s Blue, her tough Canadian roots and her Laurel Canyon lifestyle had brought her to the top of the game in California. What do you do when you’ve made it to the peak, though?

The answer lay in those roots. In the early days, before she was a coffee shop singer, before the Toronto nightclubs, before the move to the U.S., she was a teenaged jazz head living in Saskatchewan, not exactly a hot bed of cutting-edge jazz (but not, perhaps, as backwards as you might think). The first time she ever got paid to sing was on Halloween, 1962, in a club in Saskatoon that was often a haunt of jazz performers. Despite performing entirely folk material, Mitchell and her friends would seek out jazz shows whenever they came around. Her favourite album in those long-gone days was The Hottest New Group In Jazz, the fourth album by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross – an album that, given the relative paucity of jazz recordings on sale in Saskatchewan, she had to save up and pay bootleg prices for. One of the songs on The Hottest New Group In Jazz was Annie Ross’ “Twisted”. That should sound familiar, as a cover of it is the last song on Court And Spark.

And there’s the connection: where do you go when you’ve hit the top? Back to your roots, and whatever you can dig up there. For Joni Mitchell that meant exploring jazz, a genre she’d always loved but had rarely gotten the chance to explore as an artist. Court And Spark is the moment of crossover, an amalgamation of her folk mastery and her jazz explorations, an intoxicating genre mix that produced some of the best songwriting of her career – an impressive feat, given her status as one of the 20th Century’s finest songwriters. It’s about as commercial as she ever got, as well. The folk-jazz connection produced a great deal of pop melodies, particularly the swimming, gorgeous “Help Me”, her only Top Ten hit, and the David-Geffen-as-muse “Free Man In Paris.”

Despite its self-assured backing music, the lyrics showed a new, mature take on love and relationships. There is a lot of doubt and acknowledgement of the rougher side of the heart, including a look at the seediness of the singles bar scene on “Raised On Robbery”, and how close it comes to prostitution (also the folly of making a bet on the Maple Leafs). “Help Me” worries about falling in love too quickly; “People’s Parties” is self-conscious about herself around L.A. people, while recognizing that they’re all wearing masks over their true demeanors. “Same Situation” tackles the same issue – feeling self-conscious and not good enough – but contrasts it with being judged as a woman and a penitent.

Court And Spark would be the commercial and critical high point for Joni Mitchell. Her next album, 1975’s divisive Hissing Of The Summer Lawns, would continue her exploration of jazz and other, global forms of music, and would be the first in a series of albums that would divest her of all but her core audience.