The Jungle Line

A song with a dark, dangerous feel to it, something like a pounding fever dream run through with the imagery of African jungle and a packed smoky cellar. The lyrics weave the paintings of Henri Rousseau into the world of jazz. But while jazz in its earliest form did overlap with the end of Rousseau’s life (the period in which he was producing his jungle paintings) it’s unlikely he ever heard this new musical form. As it developed, jazz came to be known as ‘jungle music’ (Louis Armstrong had his ‘Tiger Rag’, Duke Ellington developed his ‘jungle sound’, etc) though neither the music nor the paintings are quite as African as they might seem. Rousseau never set foot in Africa, and while jazz certainly has most of its roots there and was developed primarily by African American musicians, it also incorporated other musical genres filtered through the American experience.



The Jungle Line’s music (not recognisably jazz, at least not to my ear) uses the thunderous rhythms of Burundi drummers (and the use here of authentic African music makes this an early example of ‘world music’), a form of music that’s presumably very traditional, set against the hot rasp of that most modern of instruments at the time, the still-monophonic Moog synthesiser. In essence, the song itself is its own jungle path. 



As she moved into jazz around this time, Ms Mitchell was presumably devouring knowledge, impressions and experiences of that music and its world, and this song would seems to be a result.



Lyrically, the song takes place during a single evening in a New York City jazz cellar. An initial impression might be that it’s describing Rousseau (or at least, since Rousseau was long dead, a Rousseau-like artist) painting images on the walls while the music plays. But further listening seems to indicate that the song is more about the narrator (presumably Ms Mitchell herself, artist that she is) imagining how Rousseau would respond to having his creativity fired by this music and this setting. So, moving forward with that interpretation...



The lyrics begin by imagining Rousseau walking into the African interior, following paths laid down by trumpet melodies. ‘Trumpet paths’ suggests ‘trumpet pads’, on which the musician’s fingers walk to create the melody; the music of the trumpet mimics the sound of African elephants; and ‘...all that jazz’, as well as meaning ‘all that kind of thing’, might even reference the song of that title from the show Chicago (which opened some months before this album’s release), set in The Jazz Age in that city. The safari then takes us back through time and place into the history of jazz music : out of this no-frills cellar bar, with its exposed metal beams and service conduits; through the music of poor black people in Southern shacks and Harlem apartment blocks; through singing in jails and churches; through the early jazz enjoyed by the rich on Park Avenue (where Gershwin played it at fancy parties) and the poor on Vine, wherever that is (though there’s a Vine St beneath Brooklyn Bridge, and the name ties in with the jungle vines being painted on the cellar walls); through jazz’s roots in Mississippi Delta blues and European folk music, and so back into Africa. The phrase ‘savage progress’ is open to the interpretation of ‘the progress of savages’, but I take it to mean the brutality that runs through the journey that this music has had to take to arrive here in this cellar bar at this moment, a history of enslavement, coercion, prejudice, disadvantage and poverty.



The second verse begins with a waitress bringing drinks to the table. She wears a top that displays her décolletage, using (perhaps being forced to use) her attractiveness as part of the job. In the lines that follow she’s described as a ‘working girl,’ so perhaps she also works as a prostitute. The narrator imagines Rousseau would exoticise her with a jungle flower behind her ear. There are dangers for her in this place, and if she succumbs to the banter she receives (‘shuck and jive’ being deceptive tomfoolery), things could go very badly for her. Imaginary Rousseau meanwhile decorates the cellar with African scenes, and we learn that the band playing the music is a five-piece ensemble.



The third verse meditates on the music the band is playing, a construction of sound in time played within a system, a product of the pain of historic suffering, but also of proficiency and practice. The cellar is air-conditioned (removing the music still further from the natural African setting conjured by imaginary Rousseau, though very necessary during the stifling New York summers).
There’s an exploration of some of the things which can be heard in the music : the musicians’ craving for their next fix (drug use being rampant among jazz musicians at the time) - though ‘smuggled in’ could also indicate the music which the African slaves carried over to America unseen; the mental or physical presence of ‘pretty women’ with their various temperaments; the sound of charging elephants and the chanting of slaves on the boats bringing them across the Atlantic. This all gets given voice through trumpet valves, as the music moves through the air like the smoke which fills the cellar (this was pre-smoking-ban days). Though ‘valves and smoke’ could also suggest the steamships bringing people (mostly immigrants, though also some native jazz musicians returning home from overseas tours) from the Old World into New York Bay, carrying with them some of the musical traditions which would eventually find their way into jazz.



The last verse begins by linking the First World War, which caused so many young men to die, with heroin (poppy poison) use, which was responsible for many casualties among the young men who played this kind of music. The tourniquet used to inject heroin intravenously looks like a snake on the dressing room floor (continuing the snake imagery which runs through the album). But as well as causing death and illness among many musicians, the drug also seems to inspire the music which issues from the ‘metal skin’ of the brass instruments and the ivory keys of the piano. This music climbs imaginary Rousseau’s vines (possibly the transmogrified ‘wires and pipes’ running up the walls) out of this hot cellar and up onto nearby Brooklyn Bridge, under which pass steamships, those other ‘metal skins’, bring people and their music into the cultural melting pot of New York City.



So what, in the end, is the ‘Jungle Line’? The route across the Atlantic by which black people were brought into America, bringing with them the toolkit for jazz? A path through the African jungle? The style of Rousseau’s paintings? The way jazz took to be in this place at this time? It could be any of these and more, though I’d opt for it being jazz music itself, that ‘ritual of sound and time’ which, like a snake, veers off at oblique angles while always remaining part of the whole.

This is one of Joni Mitchell's most impressionistic lyrics. Unlike much of her wriiting, an exact meaning is elusive. Metaphor runs rampant here; words and short phrases are used to suggest much larger concepts. I think it's about nightlife, specifically the Harlem jazz clubs of the early 20th century. The mention of painter Henri Rousseau links the jazz club imagery to ideas of primitivism, wilderness, and the untrained creative impulse. It also links the Afrocnetric to the Eurocentric, which seems to be another theme here. The cathartic experience of the wild and untamed urban nightlife is tempered by a hint of danger, as evidenced by references to poppies as a symbol of both war dead and drug use. Much like Rousseau in the lyric, Joni is painting a scene for us here, as opposed to detaailing specific events. This is one of my favorite Joni Mitchell songs. A truly outstanding piece of work.

the fourth verse plays heavily on symbols surrounding opiate abuse...and the line "drooling for a taste of something smuggled in" seems to elude to the same. given the link between heroin use and jazz in new york city (going back to pre-bebop times), it seems clear that this is what she's talking about.

I think of this as a daydream or psychedelic vision Joni Mitchell had looking at a Rousseau painting hanging in some jazz club, imagining the figures in the painting growing out of the canvas into the real world, gradually overtaking (or painting over) New York City. The fantasy of the savage nature of the jungle replacing the savage artificiality of the city suggests the idea (or hope) that nature is more powerful, but alternatively suggests similarity between jungles and cities, two different manifestations of an inherent chaos in the world. Perhaps a criticism of New York City (as savage as a jungle) or praise (as wildly beautiful as a jungle), but I think the image came to Joni Mitchell before a conscious judgement of any kind.

The mentions of women in the lyrics are peculiar, suggesting women are the city's prized prey or sexual conquest hunted savagely as in a jungle.

Consider this and then take another stab at interpreting the song meaning: Henri Rousseau's "best-known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle." (Wikipedia)

does anyone know what is said in the background after the forst verse?

sorry i meant first, type-o