Herbie Hancock's Joni Mitchell Project

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Planbee, Jun 25, 2007.

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  1. Planbee

    Planbee Negative Nellie Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago
    Below is the Popmatters review. I agree with most of it, especially their praise of Corinne Bailey Rae's take on "River." I've heard so many covers of that song that I really wasn't looking forward to another, but I'll be damned if she didn't do something interesting with it. Joni herself does a nice job on "The Tea Leaf Prophecy."

    http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/reviews/49179/herbie-hancock-river/

    Released on the same day as Joni Mitchell’s new and mature recording, Shine, River: The Joni Letters is a companion of great contrast. Where Shine is a grim look forward through a new set of often ponderous Mitchell melodies, the new Herbie Hancock album is a celebration of Joni Mitchell’s past with her great songs, her musical influences, and still-mysterious and magical affinity for jazz.

    First things first: this is a jazz record. It might even be a great one. It features impressive pop vocals from Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae, Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner, and Mitchell herself. The great bulk of the record is dominated by a killer band: Hancock’s acoustic piano, Dave Holland on bass, Lionel Loueke on guitar, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and most importantly the saxophone art of Wayne Shorter. Here you’ll find Herbie’s trio complexly reharmonizing Ellington’s “Solitude” and the quartet with Shorter reinventing Wayne’s epochal tune “Nefertiti”. Without vocals, the band abstracts Joni’s first hit, “Both Sides Now” and puts a serious post-bop hoodoo treatment on her “Sweet Bird”.

    The playing of this group is the headline. Hancock and Shorter are two of the living heavyweights of jazz, here playing open, inspired, and uncompromised music. Hancock’s playing is impressionistic and subtle but at the same time cut loose from any rules but his own, a reminder of what a great and assimilating jazz player he has always been. Shorter’s playing is weirder and even more wonderful. All through the record, he plays the skittering, keening lines that have marked his best work since his days with Hancock in Miles Davis’s band. He weaves his otherworldly sound through nearly every nook and cranny of every tune. For this work alone, the collaboration of two geniuses of modern jazz and contemporary composition, River should be on the lips of every jazz fanatic.

    What makes the record a sensation, however, is how effectively it juxtaposes the abstract jazz readings with vocal interpretations of Mitchell’s essential songs. The band plays with the same adventurous intensity whether it is freely improvising on its own or accompanying the likes of Tina Turner. Plainly, these tracks are not going to be played on pop radio any time soon. Was there really a time when Joni’s own music was played on pop radio? It seems forever ago. But who cares? Turner is hardly the most likely Joni interpreter, but her “Edith and the Kingpin” is natural and sinuous. She seems completely comfortable with Joni’s slippery melody, and there is authentic heat in hearing Tina’s vinegar pipes contrast with Hancock’s pianist impressionism and Shorter’s perpetually restless tenor sound.

    The two current pop vocalists don’t seem thrown by the all-star jazz group either. Norah Jones works generous blues into “Court and Spark”, bending up the “some” on “I worry sometimes” with sensuous control. Immediately thereafter, Shorter enters with a soprano saxophone solo of masterful originality and clarity. It’s the first song on the record, and it’s hard to imagine things getting much better. Yet rookie pop star Corinne Bailey Rae sings the classic “River” as if it were hers, blending with Wayne’s soprano on the one hand, but adding all sorts of wordless “ooooohs” and smiling slides that are utterly her own. Here, Loueke’s acoustic guitar is perfect, adding some African rhythm to the mix, against which Shorter and Hancock play continual conversation. Some tasteful vocal overdubs add a touch of candy to the song, also helping to differentiate it from the languidly tragic version that we all know from Joni’s Blue.

    The instrumental tracks will keep River: The Joni Letters from becoming too popular. Hancock’s re-imagining of “Both Sides Now” is essentially unrecognizable, gussied up in a seven-minute web of stunning harmonies. But it is beautiful and it’s the best playing we’ve heard from Herbie in a couple of decades. Loueke’s guitar is barely audible but crucially signals the entrance of the melody in shadow, presaging a tenor solo that melds with the piano rather than taking over. On “Sweet Bird”, Hancock and Shorter state the melody consecutively, but soon all bets are off as the whole band takes things in the direction of a free ballad.

    The two jazz standards are stated with just as much beautiful impressionism. “Solitude” is just for the piano trio, and Hancock gives the Ellington tune a hip new bass line that recurs at intervals. Shorter’s “Nefertiti” is played with even more abstraction than the original, with the melody stated only in fragments at first, the two improvisers engaging in a long musical discussion that amounts to a daring collective improvisation.

    A couple of tracks fare less well. “The Jungle Line” is recited with a delicious sense of drama and a generous focus on Joni’s brilliant lyric writing by Leonard Cohen while Hancock fills and colors around him, but it comes off as a coda from some different project. The reading of “Amelia” is the one thing there that seems too close to the original, and it suffers for it. Brazilian singer Luciana Souza sounds too much like the young Joni, and she is outshined by Hancock’s and Shorter’s playing. The flat delivery that works so well for Souza on her bossa-ish material feels here tentative and unsure. But even these tracks greatly repay repeated listening.

    There can’t be much doubt, of course, about the tune that is delivered by Mitchell herself. “The Tea Leaf Prophesy” is from 1988’s Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, and fans may be relatively less familiar with it. Like nearly all the material here and on Joni’s new Shine, this is long, slow and lyrical, a mood and approach that Hancock and Mitchell seem to have agreed upon just like the release dates of their albums. Indeed, Hancock, Mitchell, and Shorter are artists as closely connected as seems imaginable. Hearing Mitchell’s time-deepened alto paired again with Shorter’s soprano sax makes you wonder why she ever records without him and Hancock seems the perfect foil for both. The voice and saxophone sound sinuous and blues-coy, arcing high through the air, while Hancock’s piano is an artfully woven safety net beneath them. It is impossible not to wonder what would happen if Mitchell’s new music were recorded with such an interactive and sympathetic band? Would it be a certified masterpiece?

    If River: The Joni Letters is not quite a masterpiece, it is because that is the nature of such tribute records. It jumps about some with its different singers and instrumental shufflings. This seems to be Hancock’s preferred mode lately. His previous disc was a series of pairings with pop artists and 1998’s Gershwin’s World was a travelogue of styles around one composer. River: The Joni Letters is hugely more successful than those pu-pu platters. Indeed, it is Hancock’s most beautiful and daring album since the 1970s.

    Too many of his recent projects have seemed to be bids for approval either from the public of from the academy when Hancock hardly needs either. River may be a treatment of a “popular” artist, but it is a daring treatment that sticks to a core band of great musicians. While each visitor on the vocal tracks gives the songs a different slant, the great thrust of the record is in hearing Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter play together again. They play with unfettered free lyricism and with a completely sympathetic band.

    While pop fans of Corinne Bailey Rae and Tina Turner will not likely warm to the whole of this disc, listeners with big ears, be they Joni fanatics or Hancock’s more traditional jazz listeners, should rejoice. Herbie Hancock, the mature jazz artist most deeply connected to pop sensibilities, has created another classic record utterly on his own terms.
     
  2. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid

    Just put this one one, first three songs so far, wow, a very cool project, though anything with Herbie's involvement is always tres cool.

    Will be motoring off to Van Morrison listening to this one, but it sounds really really special thus far.

    Tina Turner needs to do a jazz styled record at least one time. Her vocal on Edith and the Kingpin is fantastic IMO.
     
  3. JA Fant

    JA Fant Well-Known Member

    Great information.
     
  4. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid

    really a great album too....
     
  5. jkauff

    jkauff Senior Member

    Location:
    Akron, OH
    I've been listening to Hancock and Shorter since the 60s; saw them tour as VSOP; saw them as a duo; saw them as a quartet with Brian Blade and Dave Holland a couple of years ago. The Joni Letters is my favorite of all their collaborations. These are truly love letters, an astonishingly moving tribute to a friend and fellow artist. They've all followed quirky paths in their careers, Joni and Wayne and Herbie and Dave Holland, going where their art took them regardless of how they were (mis-)labeled. The empathy and respect they must feel for each other comes through very strongly.

    This one hasn't been out of my player since it arrived.
     
  6. lazarus

    lazarus Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sweden
    I love this cd. It could have been bloody boring but I think it´s a great listen. Herbie and the other musicians sounds very inspired.
    "Impressionistic and subtle" is a correct description of Herbie´s playing.
     
  7. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid

    "impressionistic and subtle"...i like that....here's a review i just found on blogcritics magazine.....

    Music Review: Herbie Hancock - River: The Joni Letters
    Written by David Millington
    Published October 31, 2007
    See also:

    Lovers of jazz will need no introduction to Herbie Hancock.

    Maverick pianist from the days of the Miles Davis quintet, preferred keyboardist of the Davis fusion years and central energy of the seminal funk-jazz crossover album Head Hunters. Herbie Hancock has never been afraid to experiment with forms and genres, to explore the possibilities inherent in different music.

    However fans of Joni Mitchell may not be so well acquainted with his work. Though Joni has never been an artist to shy away from incorporating elements of jazz into her folk and rock idiom she has never quite made the step from those idioms to jazz. All of which makes the new Herbie Hancock recording, River: The Joni Letters an intriguing listen.

    For this album Herbie Hancock has assembled an eclectic mix of musicians. Saxophonist Wayne Shorter, his fellow traveller from the fusion years, bassist Dave Holland, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and west-African guitarist Lionel Loueke. There are also appearances by a number of leading luminaries, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Luciana Souza, Norah Jones and Leonard Cohen. Mitchell herself guests on a track.

    Projects like this can go astray, fall between the contrasting drives of their respective genres. Yet it is to Hancock’s credit that this album delivers. It manages an adroit balance between accessibly and improvisation without sacrificing musical integrity. It plays with Hancock’s jazzier instincts and the limitations of the rock and folk idiom. It elaborates on the subtlety of Joni Mitchell’s melodies and provides a sophisticated setting for her often quite excellent lyrics. It manages to be neither a Joni Mitchell album nor a Herbie Hancock album. Instead it occupies a space somewhere between the two.

    That is not to say it is without flaws. The title track, "The River," comes over a little too sweet. Corrine Bailey Rae’s vocals sound to my ears somewhat girlish, smothering the ironical longing of the lyrics; Also, Norah Jones’s vocals on the opening track, Court and the Spark, appear at times to get lost, to sink below the music. And the final track, one of two bonus tracks, A Case of You, while infectious and cross referencing Afro-Pop, folk and R&B could be considered superfluous.

    Stand-out tracks are Nefertiti, (a classic Wayne Shorter piece), Luciana Souza’s reading of Amelia, (melancholy, rich and warm all at once), All I Want, (performed as a true jazz-spiritual), Edith and the Kingpin, (Tina Turner on a song that lets her voice show its range and capabilities), and Joni Mitchell herself on The Tea-Leaf Prophecy. Special mention should be made of Leonard Cohen’s reading of "The Jungle Line."

    I approached this with trepidation having read that Cohen did not sing but recite the lyrics. However, despite his gravely, melancholy delivery, this track works very well. Just voice and piano, the piano returning again and again to the lower registers in an almost delta blues manner, and the voice, as would befit a man who is a published poet, ringing the nuances and levels of meaning from of the words.

    This is not a jazz album in the purist sense. Neither is it a rock or folk album. It is an album of contemporary adult music. Performed skillfully, with elegance and in a spirit of exploration.

    Those that criticize Herbie Hancock’s flirtations with popular music should consider that in many ways he is being true to the roots of jazz. A music that, (before it entered the universities and museums) was a popular music and never denied its relationship with popular forms of self-expression.

    This is an interesting and successful recording. It begs the question what further such projects could produce. A collaboration with Tina Turner, Luciana Souza or even Leonard Cohen?

    River: The Joni Letters, is well worth having. A enjoyable addition to any collection for those who love music.
     
  8. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid

    also, the Itunes Store has 2 bonus cuts "Harlem In Havana" and "I Had a King"...which are different from the 2 Amazon.com bonus cuts....both over 8 minutes long each, so another 16+ minutes of music.

    Has anyone heard these? are they Itunes + at least for better fidelity.

    of course, you cant buy those two songs as single downloads, they only come if you buy the whole thing....
     
  9. Planbee

    Planbee Negative Nellie Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago
    Do you know if they're both instrumentals? I wonder how many songs were done for this project. The Amazon version clocks in at a few seconds under 80 minutes. I smell a 2-disc "deluxe edition" version coming in a few months... :sigh:
     
  10. DJ WILBUR

    DJ WILBUR The Cappuccino Kid

    I dont know about that. I've never seen itunes exclusive tracks end up onto cds at a later date.

    as Itunes mentions no vocalists next to these titles, I'd safely assume they are instrumentals. you can hear a 30 second snippet at the itunes store, both sound great IMO...so download the itunes program BEE already and enter the 21st century....

    i noticed the japanese version of this album has 1 of the amazon cuts added to it.
     
  11. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    Do you know which of the Amazon tracks was added? There's no listing for the Japanese version on either Discogs or RYM.
     
  12. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    FYI - The bonus track on the Japanese CD is "A Case of You".
     
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