Hejira (SACD)

Description

Joni Mitchell Embarks on Open-Ended Journeys and Chronicles Restlessness on Hejira: Expansive, Jazz-Minded Effort Is Ranked the 113th Greatest Album of All Time by Rolling Stone

Mobile Fidelitys Numbered-Edition Hybrid SACD Plays with Authoritative Detail, Tonality, Immediacy, and Clarity: First Time 1976 Set Is Presented in Audiophile Sound on Disc

Joni Mitchell is the only artist who couldve made Hejira. The legendary singer-songwriter said as much when discussing the album decades after its release. Yet that fact seemed obvious from the moment the gold-certified effort streeted in fall 1976. An adventurous travelogue, probing narrative, and offbeat homage to freedom, Hejira remains an inimitable entry in the catalog of recorded music a spare, gorgeous, meditative series of sonic vignettes comprised of floating harmonic pop, cool jazz, soft rock, and sensitive vocal elements that beckon feelings of motion, discovery, and self-examination.

Sourced from the original analog master tapes, Mobile Fidelitys numbered-edition hybrid SACD presents the record ranked the 133rd Greatest of All Time by Rolling Stone with definitive detail, richness, accuracy, and directness. Marking the first time the revered effort has received audiophile treatment on disc, its one of six iconic 1970s Mitchell records Mobile Fidelity is reissuing on vinyl and SACD.

This collectible reissue reproduces in breathtaking fashion the tones, textures, and craftsmanship that help Hejira function as the equivalent of a liberating trip down an open road with nothing but blue sky, natural landscape, and fresh air in the immediate vicinity. Passages bloom, carry, decay as they do amid an acoustically optimized environment.

The reference-grade immediacy, airiness, and presence put in transparent perspective Mitchells dense strings of words, stream-of-conscious-like phrasing, and unhurried albeit forward momentum. Likewise, the instrumental contributions of her A-list support musicians a cast that includes L.A. Express members John Guerin, Max Bennett and Tom Scott, plus Neil Young, Victor Feldman, and Abe Most emerges with stellar clarity and dimensionality.

While Mitchell, whose intimate vocals and abstract guitar parts center everything, Mobile Fidelitys restoration of Hejira further reveals the visionary breadth of guitarist Larry Carlton and bassist Jaco Pastorius. Though heard on only four tracks, Pastorius fretless bass epitomizes the fluid, subtle, flexible, roomy, and shape-shifting characteristics of songs that often appear to transpire out of nowhere akin to the formation of a puffy cumulus cloud overhead. In sync with Mitchells voice, Pastorius fusion hovers and floats, suspended in a fog you want to deeply inhale. The grace notes Mitchell desired on Hejira can now be heard in full. Ditto the luxurious tapestries of alinear lines, fills, and supplements unreeled on Carltons six-string.

Housed in mini-LP-style gatefold packaging, this SACD also allows you to examine the unforgettable Hejira album cover a pastiche of 14 different photos Mitchell used a Camera Lucida to assemble into one image thats anchored by a portrait of her in a stoic pose and the interior shots of Mitchell skating on a frozen Wisconsin lake wearing a pair of black skates, black shirt, and fur cape.

The notion of skating, feeling an awakening wind whipping against your face, and losing yourself to the surroundings are extremely apt for Hejira, which Mitchell wrote after a sequence of trips and relationships prompted her to reflect on the complicated conflicts between independence and marriage, success and satisfaction, duty and desire and, more specifically, the cost of being a woman. The Canadian native delved into such themes before. But never as she does on Hejira, whose liberating, running-away aura doubles as another of Mitchells rejections of tradition as well as a suggestion of a better alternative.

At once observational and personal, expansive and insular, cheerful and poignant, Hejira spans a sea of human conditions, emotions, and circumstances. It addresses drifting, isolation, pleasure, place, time, and surroundings with strikingly poetic discourse matched with music that, save for the crooned ballad Blue Motel Room, forgoes conventional structures and choruses.

The jazz-based arrangements, marked by scaled-down percussion and all manner of bent, rounded, and unsettled notes, hint that Mitchell has no exact destination in mind. Excursions such as the moody Furry Sings the Blues, funky Coyote and edgy Black Crow throw open previously locked doors to possibility and journey. They signal its time for a welcome departure from norms and the past, one that leads to a heightened sense of clarity and perspective. Or, as Mitchell said upon choosing the album title, its time for leaving the dream, no blame.