India, July 12 -- Joni Mitchell, at 82, is having the kind of season many artists don't get at their peak. In March, she won Canada's Juno Lifetime Achievement honour. Weeks earlier, she won a Grammy for Best Historical Album, for Joni Mitchell Archives - Volume 4, a six-disc set drawn from the vaults of her most restless creative period. On June 22, in an act of communal listening, cinemas in Helsinki, Los Angeles and Sheffield went dark to play Blue (1971) - turning 55 that day - in a deep-listening session (of the kind I've written about in recent editions of this column). All three moments are really the same story: a six-decade-late acknowledgment that Mitchell was never the "confessional singer-songwriter" that critics made her out to be. She was a musical virtuoso. Blue, for instance, holds up to any scrutiny. Mitchell wrote its guitar songs in open tunings she invented herself - eventually more than 50 non-standard configurations. She co-produced the album with Henry Lewy, designed the cover, and arranged the dulcimer parts. Her control was over the whole object, not just the songs. Even her voice was an instrument being reinvented. Yet, for most of her career, her oeuvre was discussed in terms rarely applied to male artists making equally naked work: "raw", "confessional", "personal". Bob Dylan's equally autobiographical Blood on the Tracks (1975) got called Shakespearean. Mitchell noticed and said so, which didn't endear her to some critics, but at least she had the last word. If Blue is Mitchell's most-celebrated record, Court and Spark (1974) is arguably her most complete: a jazz-inflected pop album made with Tom Scott's LA Express that was neither diluted jazz nor compromised pop but something else entirely. Then, in 1978, came the boldest move of Mitchell's career: Jazz great Charles Mingus, dying of a progressive neurological disease, called and asked her to collaborate on his final compositions. The resulting album, released months after his death, paired Mitchell's lyrics with music by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Rock critics were baffled while jazz critics largely weren't. Hancock built a Grammy-winning album, River: The Joni Letters (2007), out of her songs. Shorter played on Court and Spark. When he wanted to collaborate with a vocalist, Mingus called her. Those are the associations of a musician other musicians recognised as a genius. Prince was a fan, and would point out to her specific chords he had stolen from her catalogue. So was Rufus Wainwright. This was no confessional folk singer, but a musician whose vocabulary other musicians kept wanting to borrow. This season of recognition, however belated, demands we finally listen to what was there all along....