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HERBIE HANCOCK | River: The Joni Letters
TRACK LISTING
1 Court And Spark - Norah Jones, Herbie Hancock
2 Edith And The Kingpin - Herbie Hancock, Tina Turner
3 Both Sides Now
4 River - Corinne Bailey Rae, Herbie Hancock
5 Sweet Bird
6 The Tea Leaf Prophecy (Lay Down Your Arms) - Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock
7 Solitude
8 Amelia - Herbie Hancock, Luciana Souza
9 Nefertiti - Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter
10 The Jungle Line - Leonard Cohen, Herbie Hancock
Herbie Hancock’s “River: The Joni Letters” is a collection of songs, vocal and instrumental, composed by or influential to Joni Mitchell. Featuring guest vocalists – Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner, Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae and Luciana Souza.
Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock, along with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Pablo Picasso, and other great artists of our time, share an incessant and profound creative restlessness. They each have always had the desire and need to break fresh ground with each note played or stroke of the brush. It was exactly this kind of curiosity which motivated Davis to hire Hancock in 1963 to be a part of, along with Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, arguably one of the most important groups of musicians of the twentieth century. It was in fact Miles who told Hancock to “never finish anything.” Hancock, like Joni Mitchell, has gone on to explore many different genres and mediums to express his incessant curiosity, working in the context of jazz, electronic music, funk, orchestral, and film music.
Hancock first worked with Joni Mitchell on the iconic singer/songwriter’s Mingus record, an album comprised of collaborations between Mitchell and the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus. Together with Wayne Shorter, Hancock was part of a small group with which Mitchell tried to craft a new “conversational” approach to coupling lyrics with instrumental jazz.
“At this point in my career,” Hancock says, “I want to do something that reaches into the lives and hearts of people.” For “River”, Hancock enlisted producer/ arranger/ bassist Larry Klein (Mitchell’s long-time producer and creative partner, who has also produced albums by Madeleine Peyroux and Shawn Colvin among many others), to help him go deeply into Mitchell’s body of work to select songs that Hancock and Klein could adapt to a genre-less and conversational musical approach, while trying to portray the breadth of Mitchell’s gift as a musician and writer. To add another dimension to their picture of Mitchell’s musical world, they also included two compositions that were important to her musical development, Wayne Shorter’s asymmetrical masterpiece “Nefertiti”, first recorded by Hancock and Shorter on Miles Davis’ classic album of the same name, and Duke Ellington’s prescient standard “Solitude”.
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