Hejira is a 1976 folk/rock/jazz album by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. The album title is a transliteration of the Arabic word hijra, which means "journey", referring specifically to the prophet Muhammad's and his followers' escape from Mecca to Medina in 622. The songs on the album were largely written by Mitchell on a trip by car from Maine back to Los Angeles, California, with prominent imagery including highways, small towns and snow. The photographs on the front and back cover were taken of Mitchell by Norman Seeff and appear against a backdrop of Lake Mendota, in Madison, Wisconsin, after an ice storm.Doug Moe, "", The Capital Times, March 31, 2006.

Themes

Mitchell said of the album: "the whole 'Hejira' album was really inspired... I wrote the album while traveling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it... The sweet loneliness of solitary travel." http

Dominated by Mitchell's guitar and Jaco Pastorius's distinctive fretless bass, it drew on a range of influences but was more cohesive and accessible than some of her later more jazz-oriented work. "Coyote", "Amelia" and "Hejira" all became concert staples shortly after Hejiras release, especially after being featured on the live album Shadows and Light, alongside "Furry Sings the Blues" and "Black Crow".

Though "Coyote" and "Black Crow" are fast-strummed folksy numbers, the rest of Hejira is slow and often languid, notably the epic "Song for Sharon", which deals with the conflict between freedom and marriage faced by a woman and is interspersed with images of New York City including a trip to Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island. "Amelia" interleaves a story of a desert journey (the "hejira within the hejira".) with the famous aviator Amelia Earhart who mysteriously vanished during a flight over the Pacific Ocean. Mitchell has commented on the origins of the song: "I was thinking of Amelia Earhart and addressing it from one solo pilot to another... sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do." The song repeatedly shifts between two keys, giving it a constant unsettled feeling..

"Furry Sings the Blues" was inspired by a meeting that occurred between Mitchell and the blues guitarist and singer Furry Lewis in Memphis in 1975. Lewis was displeased with Mitchell's unauthorized use of his name and "hated" the song.httpRolling Stone article: "." February 24, 1977. He told Rolling Stone in February 1977: "She shouldn't have used my name in no way, shape, form or faction without consultin' me 'bout it first. The woman came over here and I treated her right, just like I does everybody that comes over. She wanted to hear 'bout the old days, said it was for her own personal self, and I told it to her like it was, gave her straight oil from the can."

Release

Commercially, the album did not do as well as its two predecessors, although it still reached #13 on the Billboard 200 pop album chart and was certified Gold, but failed to get significant airplay on commercial radio. Critically, the album was generally well received and has since been recognized as one of the high-water marks in Mitchell's career. In 2000, German Spex magazine critics voted it the 55th greatest album of the 20th century, calling it "a self-confident, coolly elegant design". Furthermore, its cover was chosen as the 11th greatest album cover by Rolling Stone in 1991.http Lyle Mays, the keyboardist of the Pat Metheny Group and co-composer of most of their music, has remarked that the album is a personal favorite of his.

Personnel

*Joni Mitchell: vocals, acoustic & electric guitars

*Larry Carlton: acoustic & electric guitars

*Abe Most: clarinet on "Hejira"

*Neil Young: harmonica on "Furry Sings the Blues"

*Chuck Findley: horns on "Refuge of the Roads"

*Tom Scott: horns on "Refuge of the Roads"

*Victor Feldman: vibraphone on "Amelia"

*Jaco Pastorius: bass on "Refuge of the Roads", "Black Crow", "Hejira" and "Coyote"

*Max Bennett: bass on "Song for Sharon", "Furry Sings the Blues"

*Chuck Domanico: bass on "Blue Motel Room"

*John Guerin: drums

*Bobbye Hall: percussion

See also

*Hijra (Islam)

*Hijra (South Asia)

(both sometimes transliterated as hijira or hejira)

References

Artist/Band Information

Joni Mitchell, CC, (born Roberta Joan Anderson; November 7, 1943) is a Canadian musician, songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Western Canada and then busking on the streets of Toronto. In the mid-1960s she left for New York City and its rich folk music scene, recording her debut album in 1968 and achieving fame first as a songwriter ("Urge for Going", "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", "Woodstock") and then as a singer in her own right. Finally settling in Southern California, Mitchell played a key part in the folk rock movement then sweeping the musical landscape. Blue, her starkly personal 1971 album, is regarded as one of the strongest and most influential records of the time. Mitchell also had pop hits such as "Big Yellow Taxi", "Free Man in Paris", and "Help Me", the last two from 1974's best-selling Court and Spark.

Mitchell's distinctive harmonic guitar style, and piano arrangements all grew more complex through the 1970s as she was deeply influenced by jazz, melding it with pop, folk and rock on experimental albums like 1976's Hejira. She worked closely with jazz greats including Pat Metheny, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, and on a 1979 record released after his death, Charles Mingus. From the 1980s on, Mitchell reduced her recording and touring schedule but turned again toward pop, making greater use of synthesizers and direct political protest in her lyrics, which often tackled social and environmental themes alongside romantic and emotional ones.

Mitchell's work is highly respected both by critics and by fellow musicians. Rolling Stone magazine called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever," while Allmusic said, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century." Mitchell is also a visual artist. She created the artwork for each of her albums, and in 2000 described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance."Interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell stopped recording over the last several years, focusing more attention on painting, but in 2007 she released Shine, her first album of new songs in nine years.

Early life

Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, to Bill Anderson and Myrtle Anderson (née McKee). Her mother was a teacher, and her father an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. During the war years, she moved with her parents to a number of bases in western Canada. After the war, her father began working as a grocer, and his work took the family to Saskatchewan to the towns of Maidstone and North Battleford. When she was eleven years old, the family settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which Mitchell considers her hometown.

Her mother's ancestors were Scottish and Irish.Irish Times Magazine, p. 14, July 19, 2008 Her father's were Norwegian. Her paternal grandmother was born on the farm Farestveit in Modalen, Hordaland, Norway. Her paternal grandfather was from Sømna, Sør-Helgeland, Nordland, Norway.

At the age of nine, Mitchell contracted polio during a Canadian epidemic, but she recovered after a stay in hospital. Extraordinarily, this was the same polio epidemic (1951) in which singer Neil Young, then aged five, also contracted the virus.George McKay (2009) '. Popular Music 28:3, 341-365. It was during this time that she first became interested in singing. She describes her first experience singing while in hospital during the winter in the following way:

"They said I might not walk again, and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas. I wouldn't go for it. So I started to sing Christmas carols and I used to sing them real loud ... The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I was a ham." She began smoking at the age of nine as well, a habit which is arguably one of the factors contributing to the change in her voice in recent years (Mitchell herself disputes this in several interviews).

As a teenager, Joni taught herself ukulele and, later, guitar. She began performing at parties and bonfires, which eventually led to gigs playing in coffeehouses and other venues in Saskatoon. After finishing high school at Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, she attended the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary for a year, during which she made the acquaintance of another budding singer-songwriter, Harry Chapin, but Mitchell then left, telling her mother: "I'm going to Toronto to be a folksinger."

After leaving art college in June 1964, Mitchell left her home in Saskatoon to relocate to Toronto. She found out that she was pregnant by her college ex-boyfriend, and in February 1965 she gave birth to a baby girl. A few weeks after the birth, Joni Anderson married folk-singer Chuck Mitchell, and took his surname. A few weeks later she gave her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, up for adoption. The experience remained private for most of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, most notably a very specific telling of the story in the 1971 song "Little Green". Mitchell's 1982 song "Chinese Cafe", from the album Wild Things Run Fast, includes the lyrics "Your kids are coming up straight / My child's a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her."

Mitchell's daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, began a search for her as an adult. In 1997 Gibb mentioned her search to the girlfriend of a man with whom she had grown up. By coincidence, this woman knew a third person who had once told her that he knew Joni Mitchell years earlier "when she was pregnant." Mitchell and her daughter were reunited shortly thereafter.

Career

1965–1969: Breakthrough

In the summer of 1965, Chuck Mitchell took Joni with him to the United States. While living in Detroit, Chuck & Joni were regular performers at area coffee houses as well as The Alcove bar near Wayne State University and the "Rathskelter" a restaurant on the campus of the University of Detroit. Oscar Brand featured her several times on his CBC television program Let's Sing Out in 1965 and 1966, broadening her exposure. Mitchell attended school at West Virginia University for short period, which led to her song "Morning Morgantown." The marriage and partnership of Joni and Chuck Mitchell dissolved in early 1967, and Joni moved to New York City to pursue her musical dreams as a solo artist. She played venues up and down the East Coast, including Philadelphia, Boston, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She performed frequently in coffeehouses and folk clubs and, by this time creating her own material, became well known for her unique songwriting and her innovative guitar style.

Folk singer Tom Rush had met Mitchell in Toronto and was impressed with her songwriting ability. He took "Urge For Going" to popular folk act Judy Collins but she was not interested in the song at the time, so Rush recorded it himself. Country singer George Hamilton IV heard Rush performing it and recorded a hit country version. Other artists who recorded Mitchell songs in the early years were Buffy Sainte-Marie ("The Circle Game"), Dave Van Ronk ("Both Sides Now"), and eventually Judy Collins ("Both Sides Now", a top ten hit, included on her 1967 album Wildflowers). Collins also covered "Chelsea Morning", a recording which again eclipsed Mitchell's own commercial success early on.

While she was playing one night in "The Gaslight South", a club in Coconut Grove, Florida, David Crosby walked in and was immediately struck by her ability and her appeal as an artist. He took her back to Los Angeles, where he set about introducing her and her music to his friends. Crosby convinced a record company to agree to let Mitchell record a solo acoustic album without all the folk-rock overdubs that were in vogue at the time, and his clout earned him a producer's credit in March 1968, when Reprise Records released her debut album, alternately known as Joni Mitchell or Song to a Seagull.

Mitchell continued touring steadily to promote the LP. The tour helped create eager anticipation for Mitchell's second LP, Clouds, which was released in April 1969. It finally contained Mitchell's own versions of some of her songs already recorded and performed by other artists: "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", and "Tin Angel." The covers of both LPs, including a self-portrait on Clouds, were designed and painted by Mitchell, a marriage of her art and music which she would continue throughout her career.

1970–1974: Mainstream success

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