Chaka Khan

Khan has called Joni Mitchell "my No. 1 artist and songwriter" since her teens, and made good on it in November 2018: at a Dorothy Chandler Pavilion concert marking Mitchell's 75th birthday, she sang "Help Me," backed by Rufus Wainwright and Seal, later released on Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration. "That woman ... let me tell you, there is no one like her on the planet," Khan told PopMatters in 2007. "She's the best. I want to be like her when I grow up." She has since vowed to cover a Mitchell song on every album she makes, "just to educate the kids."

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1974

Help MeJoni Mitchell

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2019

Help MeChaka Khan

listen forMitchell's 1974 original rides a nervous, tumbling energy — her phrasing runs just ahead of Tom Scott's L.A. Express horns, like someone talking faster than they can think through the panic in the lyric. Khan's 2019 tribute-concert version slows the same tune into a testimony: she holds notes Mitchell rushed past and lets Wainwright and Seal's harmonies build behind her rather than chase her, turning a song about romantic panic into something closer to a soul sermon. Melody and words are identical; the pacing is entirely Khan's own.

Khan visualizes her own voice as an instrument, not a throat: "Horn players will do that for me — Miles Davis, of course... I kind of visualize my voice as a saxophone," she told Performing Songwriter. The admiration became mutual and then literal — Davis played trumpet on "Sticky Wicked," a Prince-written, Prince-produced track on Khan's 1988 album C.K. "Working with him was a highlight of my life," she said. "My dad listened to him when I was growing up, so for my dad to hear me with Miles... was truly a blessing." Davis, for his part, told her simply: "You sing like my horn."

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1959

Blue in GreenMiles Davis

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1988

Sticky WickedChaka Khan

listen for"Blue in Green" is Davis at his most spare — long, breath-shaped phrases with silence doing as much work as notes, a trumpet that sounds like it's thinking out loud. On "Sticky Wicked," that same unhurried horn threads through Prince's loose, off-kilter funk groove while Khan half-sings, half-raps overtop — two players trading the lead rather than one accompanying the other. Listen for how closely her phrasing sits behind Davis's horn, holding back exactly where he does.

Khan's grandmother Maude played Billie Holiday records that stopped her granddaughter cold as a child. "I remember the first time I ever heard her I was listening to an album of hers with my grandmother... She got so much emotion across just by the way she would add those little nuances," Khan told Performing Songwriter — a lesson, she said, in "how to get an emotion across" with a song. Decades later she framed the debt as kinship: "I feel that way about Billie Holiday. I know her in an intimate way... I understand, too, because I've been where she is."

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1939

Them There EyesBillie Holiday

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1982

Them There EyesChaka Khan

listen forHoliday's 1939 "Them There Eyes" hangs deliberately behind the beat, clipping some syllables short and stretching others, turning a novelty lyric into something wry and world-weary. Khan's 1982 version, cut with jazz players Chick Corea and Freddie Hubbard for her standards album Echoes of an Era, keeps that same behind-the-beat pull but pushes it toward virtuosity — where Holiday underplays a phrase, Khan bends and extends it, showing the technique Holiday spent a career hiding.