Nominated at the 1980 Grammy Awards as "Best Female Performer", "Best Album Of The Year", "Best New Artist", she won this last title and this supreme award effortlessly, adding to this prestigious list an additional trophy, that of “Best Jazz Interpreter”, awarded by the US Press the same year.

But while proclaiming the new singer’s genius, this same Press was quick to compare Jones to Laura Nyro, then anointed her a "New Joni Mitchell", being always eager for women's wrestling and ready to do anything to make ladies go wild and nasty in the boxing ring. These unsound comparisons did eventually irritate the newcomer a bit, to put it mildly. Occurring specifically in the Jazz field, a clash followed then and broke out between Venice's new sensation and elder Joni Mitchell (who had just released Mingus by then). Jazz, a musical field fiercely claimed by Jones, where she basically declared to “Rolling Stone” Magazine (perhaps a bit unwisely, considering the masterpiece that Mingus was and the classic it became), that Mitchell had nothing to do with Jazz, reproaching her to not have the necessary soul and “guts" for interpreting Jazz standards, because being too bland, too slick and above all, stating that Jazz was foreign to Mitchell because the "Pairie Girl" had never been on the "Jazz side of Life".
Here, Jones probably alluded to some kind of descent to hell in the dens and smoky bars of Los Angeles, the newcomer having become one of their pillars at the time of her affair with Tom Waits. Unsurprisingly, Mitchell did not let it go though, and fought back through the medias. Fortunately, this did not prevent these two marvelous artists (whose exceptional art and musicianship had never had anything in common but a resembling portrait with a beret, a cigarette and a similar blondness photographed once by the great Norman Seeff for Jones' first album’s cover sleeve…), to bury the hatchet permanently a few years later, united in the same fight against the mistreatment that the Recording Industry inflicted to their respective catalogues : their shared label (Geffen, in this case) threatened to remove both singers’ studio albums from the shops’ shelves, to sell commercial "Best Of" instead...