Joni Mitchell - Hejira

[mjzee]

Does anyone else here love this album? I've just transferred my poppy, warped vinyl copy to mp3. There is such a sound, a mood to this record. The lyrics are insightful, and the playing is just beautiful. In my memory, I thought Jaco dominated the album, and was surprised to see he's only on about half the album. Also surprisingly, the unsung hero (besides Mitchell's guitar playing) is Larry Carlton; he may have done smooth jazz in other contexts, but here he drops perfect little pearls of guitar. Also Bobbye Hall on percussion! So tasteful. I also got a kick when I realized the rhythm section of Hot Rats, Max Bennett and John Guerin, do an obviously different job on two tracks here. All in all, just a masterpiece.

[WorldB3]

Agree, Amelia alone could make it my favorite Joni Mitchell album, Larry Carlton is fantastic on the whole record, even the songs I like a little less than others.

Keep waiting for a nice remaster re-issue of it. Pat Metheny has a nice extended guitar solo after Amelia on Shadows and Light if you don't have it.

"People will tell you where theyve gone

Theyll tell you where to go

But till you get there yourself you never really know

Where some have found their paradise

Others just come to harm

Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm"

Edited June 23, 2009 by WorldB3

[JSngry]

Great music, possibly the apex of Joni's musical creativity.

And definitely my favorite Jaco, bar none.

Look at who all is on this record, what they had done before, and then how they brought it all here to make a basically new type of music. No easy feat, that, but then again, it was a time when "purity" was not the be all and end all either.

[Free For All]

A definite favorite Joni side.

[A Lark Ascending]

My favourite too. Everything - music, lyrics, atmosphere so perfectly poised.

What has happened to the promised remasters of the records of this era?

[skeith]

Stangely, this one has never done much for me.

I much prefer Blue, For the Roses, Court and Spark, and some works which precede these

[A Lark Ascending]

Stangely, this one has never done much for me.

I much prefer Blue, For the Roses, Court and Spark, and some works which precede these

That's one of music's many beauties...we can all react differently. I've never been one for accepting a decisive interpretation of what is of most value in a performers output.

For me the arc from Blue to Hejira is one of increasing levels of extraordinariness. I find music to enjoy before and immediately after but it doesn't have the same hold. After Mingus a have very little interest (though I did like the two discs of reinterpretations of a few years back).

[Free For All]

(though I did like the two discs of reinterpretations of a few years back).

That was the one with the Vince Mendoza arrangements, IIRC. I enjoyed that too.

When I heard her sing on Herbie's Gershwin record (on The Man I Love) I never would have guessed it was Joni. Her voice has certainly aged in an interesting way over the years- I'm guessing much of that was from smoking.

[Alexander]

Great album and it really facilitated my eventual interest in fusion! For a long time I was strictly into acoustic jazz, but I was also a Joni fan. I had this and her other albums with Jaco, et al. When I started checking out fusion, my first thought was "Gee, this sounds a lot like 'Hejira'!"

[JSngry]

This one mesmerized me for months.

Yeah, it was some more of that "gee, I've never hear anything like this before!" stuff that seemed to be the norm there for a while.

Right place, right time for everybody, I suspect...lots of things that probably inevitably would come together came together. I thought it should always be like that, but...I guess I was wrong. Maybe in another 50-60 (or more, or less) years there will be some more not-really-loose "loose ends" floating around to (re)connect.

[Hot Ptah]

The background on the cover is Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin. It often looked just like that as I walked around the University of Wisconsin campus as an undergrad. The campus goes right up to its shores.

[David Ayers]

Actually I didn't know this but bought the one after it, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter on its original issue. That one grew on me somewhat even if I never loved it - enough that I redeemed it from the charity shop and still have it here. DJRD was widely slated, but listening to Hejira right now on Spotify it sounds somewhat similar and is rated by AMG as last in a long run of gud uns (DJRD was next so implicitly not a goodie). So hm aside from predictability of liking Blue and Mingus... what's truly what with the whingeing one?

[A Lark Ascending]

The flaw for me with DJRD is 'Paprika Plains' - doesn't sustain interest for me over its length and the orchestrations are a bit over the top. I really like the other 3 sides (of the original LP).

'The Hissing of Summer Lawns' is the other peak for me - the lyrics lose that confessional 'woke-up-this-morning and found myself with David Crosby/Graham Nash or whoever' feel that can make your toes curl on some of the earlier stuff. It's either third person or stepping into the role of someone else. Great range of sounds from Hollywood orchestration (just right for the song) through African drums, sleazy lounge-jazz, primitive mono-synth and extraordinary guitar playing by Joni herself (listen to 'Don't Interrupt the Sorrow').

This is the one I want the remaster for - the sound on my first generation CD is flat as a pancake.

'Court and Spark' is a less earnest affair but has great tunes and, again, some sharp lyrics.

Edited June 23, 2009 by Bev Stapleton

[David Ayers]

I'll never prefer any to Blue.

'We're 29 Ross, we're not women.'

[JSngry]

'Court and Spark' is a less earnest affair but has great tunes and, again, some sharp lyrics.

And a what-was-then cutting edge production style, what with all the LA session players who were only a few years ago "jazz players" making pop music wholly unlike the generation of like-labeled players before them. You get that on Miles Of Aisles as well, and maybe a day or two before Steely Dan started going deep into the same territory.

[JSngry]

'The Hissing of Summer Lawns' is the other peak for me - the lyrics lose that confessional 'woke-up-this-morning and found myself with David Crosby/Graham Nash or whoever' feel that can make your toes curl on some of the earlier stuff. It's either third person or stepping into the role of someone else. Great range of sounds from Hollywood orchestration (just right for the song) through African drums, sleazy lounge-jazz, primitive mono-synth and extraordinary guitar playing by Joni herself (listen to 'Don't Interrupt the Sorrow').

That's a great record too, imo, but it's generally considered to be The Record That Ruined Joni Mitchell's Career, her Pet Sounds, if you will...but hey...she got a new, if significantly smaller, audience out of that one.

The flaw for me with DJRD is 'Paprika Plains' - doesn't sustain interest for me over its length and the orchestrations are a bit over the top. I really like the other 3 sides (of the original LP).

Yeah, that, and for me, the whole thing doesn't hold together conceptually as an album as well as did its predecessor. Great parts though!

[Alexander]

'The Hissing of Summer Lawns' is the other peak for me - the lyrics lose that confessional 'woke-up-this-morning and found myself with David Crosby/Graham Nash or whoever' feel that can make your toes curl on some of the earlier stuff. It's either third person or stepping into the role of someone else. Great range of sounds from Hollywood orchestration (just right for the song) through African drums, sleazy lounge-jazz, primitive mono-synth and extraordinary guitar playing by Joni herself (listen to 'Don't Interrupt the Sorrow').

That's a great record too, imo, but it's generally considered to be The Record That Ruined Joni Mitchell's Career, her Pet Sounds, if you will...but hey...she got a new, if significantly smaller, audience out of that one.

Really. I love "The Hissing of Summer Lawns." That was the only new album I bought during the Spring Semester of 1991 and I listened to it over and over again for months...

[JSngry]

I was living in the "music student's dorm" when Hissing came out, and it was so funny...you'd walk down the halls & from rooms where you usually heard jazz or classical of one type or another, you'd hear Joni Mitchell. Before that, a few people were into Court & Spark for the reason I mentioned above, and there were always a few chicks into the earlier stuff (no sexism intended, that's just how it was, and if "chicks" offends anybody today, sorry, but this was a musician's dorm and "chicks" was universally accepted/condoned parlance, and its starting to piss me off that I even feel the need to explain this...), and putting "Twisted" at the end of the album was a nifty "wow" factor for people who couldn't believe that a "folk singer" had all of a sudden started wading off into these....deep waters with nary a trace of stumbling and a fairly large dose of mastery. This one got a lot of people's attention.

Not as many as it pissed off, but them's the breaks, eh?

[WorldB3]

As a kid I loved Side 2 of The Hissing of Summer Lawns with the title track and Shadows and Light. I didn't realize at the time how brilliant they were but I knew they were good. Funny to look back now growing up in a California berb and not getting what that song was really about until I left.

[danasgoodstuff]

This is the only Joni album I rebought when my ex got them all. When I had it on LP I just listened to the first side, the rest of the Jaco period I find pretty hit & miss, but when it hits it's not like anything else by anyone involved. Saw the Shadows and Light tour, loved it, the subsequent live album not so much. I'm not much on confessional singer/songwriters generally. Can't thing of Joni without thinking of my late brother being nonplussed at seeing her drinking at the Ritz in S'toon. Or of how stunningly selfinvolved whe seemed when the daughter she gave up to pursue her career surfaced. "I wish I had a river I could skate away on."

Was it Lester Bangs who called her unorthadox cord voicings "cunty"? Well, at lest he thought they meant something...

[mjzee]

My 3 favorites of hers were Hejira, Blue and Clouds. DJRD seemed like Hejira Vol. 2, but more unfocussed. One sensed she was losing self-control; a tipoff was her "pissing a tequila anaconda the length of the parking lot" (a startling turn of phrase to be sure, but one I wished she didn't share), but it does make me wonder about the nature of the white lines of the freeway she was a prisoner to.

I just never got into HOSC, it just never connected to me. I once owned it in Quad!

Through the box set "What It Is!", I got an interesting insight into the appearance of Cheech and Chong on Twisted. Tommy Chong was a bass player for a band in Canada; I'll bet they knew each other way back when.

[skeith]

Ok, I finally get Hejira.... bought it for something like the third or fourth time.

I am such a big fan of hers but Hejira had not in the past ever really clicked for me.... I suspect that it has to do with my perceived lack of really strong melodies or perhaps "hooks" (probably not the right word) compared to earlier albums.

I can probably hum the melody to most of the songs from earlier records which I can not do for Hejira...and yes the melodies of the songs seem to be not that different between the songs... but Hejira is really growing on me now.

[jazzbo]

Cool Stuart. Man, Hejira hooked me right when it was released and is among the few that I will pull out and listen to these days. I think it's the storytelling and the particular "confessional" style and ideas, that has always resonated with me.

The lp sounds really good on my system!

[skeith]

I just picked up the album which followed Hejira ... the one called "Mingus" and I like it very much, even as much as Hejira and I had always been told this was a bad one. The little taped segments ... the what would normally appear to be clunky lyrics on God Must be a boogie Man and Goodbye Pork Pie Hat... it all works for me.

Edited November 19, 2013 by skeith

[jazzbo]

"Mingus" is one that grows on me more and more through the years. When first released it just seemed an odd duck to me, not really jazz and not really Joni. But over the years my listening has really expanded my sense of what is jazz and what is Joni, and I hear it all as much more cohesive and sincere than I ever did before.

Love the lyrics of "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat." Really works for me. Over the years the truth of these lines (that seemed sort of glib and shallow to me on first listenings) have revealed themselves:

Love is never easy
It's short of the hope we have for happiness
Bright and sweet
Love is never easy street!

Edited November 19, 2013 by jazzbo