AAA Vinyl

Not that it’s any of my business, but I was disappointed reading that Joni Mitchell had nixed Taylor Swift’s playing her in a biopix. “All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones” she’s reported to have said.

But reading further it turned out that Mitchell was against the project based upon the material not necessarily because of Swift’s casting. Detractors who dismiss Taylor Swift as a shallow corporate creation aren’t being fair. She seems like a smart young woman—and I’m not saying that just because she’s a vinyl advocate—who has charted her own path, or at least it seems that’s the case. In a gutsy move Swift pulled her music from Spotify’s free stream.

It could be argued that Swift is playing the “pop chick” much like Mitchell played the “hippie chick” early in her career because at the time that was where the natural musical point of entry. Whether that’s true about Swift remains to be seen. Certainly the challenge of playing a complex, brilliant and uncompromising artist like Joni Mitchell would help reveal Swift's depth or lack thereof.

For Mitchell Court and Spark was the “bridge” album between her folk period and her move to jazz, which was fully accomplished with the release of 1975’s Hissing of Summer Lawns (which those of us still in adolescent mode called “Pissing on Summer Lawns) that many found dense, inaccessible and more precious and self-conscience than Paul Simon at his worst.

On Hejira Mitchell bridges and jazz/folk divide with an album rooted in her early folk self but with a jazzy overlay anchored by Jaco Pastorius’s hypnotic undulating bass lines and Mitchell’s open tuned chorused electric guitar. Extra credit is due all of the musicians playing on this album but especially guitarist Larry Carlton and drummer John Guerin, who often had to hop time signature mid-tune.

In Arabic the word “hijra” means “journey”. The songs, written mostly during a solitary cross-country car ride from Maine to Los Angeles have an elastic, shimmering rhythmic pulse that suggest movement and restlessness.

Mitchell sings about fellow “solo traveler” Amelia Airhart and in “Song For Sharon”, a painful confessional about marriage and freedom set against a trip to visit the Mandolin Brothers vintage instrument shop on Staten Island, N.Y (the owner of which, Stan Jay, recently passed away at age 71) she lays bare a conflicted soul.

Mitchell sings of a meeting with the blues veteran Furry Lewis and of roads, motel rooms, flight and of “taking refuge in the roads” all set to melodies that can’t be hummed and song constructions that lack the expected turn arounds, verse/chorus repetitiveness and connecting bridges.

For many listeners back in 1976 habituated to those conventions, Hijera came across as impenetrable (though the lyrics are far more straightforward than they are metaphorical), overly linear and a-melodic. For those comfortable seeing Ms. Mitchell as a “lady of the canyon, seeing the beret-wearing ice queen on the highly stylized front cover was more an encounter with a stranger than reconnection with an old friend.

The album wasn’t a big seller relative to many of Mitchell’s previous releases but it remains one of her most fully realized and thematically consistent artistic statements both musically and lyrically and one that stands well the test of time.

This new reissue cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering and pressed at RTI is sonically superior to the original in every way. There’s far less if any compression (if any)). Dynamics are far greater, imaging well-clarified and soundstaging far more expansive and deep. In every way the reissue beats the original’s sonics. It's a difficult cut too, because the sides are long. The lackluster reproduction of Norman Seef's striking cover photo of Mitchell disappoints and the reissue does not include the original's raised lettering (though it does include the original's striking inner sleeve). However, it costs $24.95, which for an AAA mastering and RTI pressing these days is quite reasonable. And can someone tell me what that veiny, phallic thing is popping up from the highway?