If you closed your eyes at Shrewsbury School’s stunning Barnes Theatre on the evening of Friday 25th April, you could easily believe that Joni Mitchell’s band for the ‘Shadows and Light’ tour of 1979, featuring Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Michael Brecker, Jaco Pastorius and Don Alias had just taken to the stage, so faithfully does this outstanding 7-piece band ‘Hejira’ celebrate and honour Joni’s works, chosen mainly from her ‘jazz era’, spanning the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Hattie Whitehead’s uncanny feel for the phrasing and timing of Joni’s voice and her mastery of those rich alternative guitar tunings means she was able to lead us effortlessly through numbers like ‘Help me’ and ‘Just like this train’ from the ‘Court and Spark’ album, a new arrangement of ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’, and, from the Hejira album itself, ‘Coyote’ and ’Song for Sharon’ with its meandering, painfully reflective ten verses (Hattie didn’t forget a single word).
Yet this is a gathering of seven extraordinary musicians, whose whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. The band was originally the brainchild of guitarist Pete Oxley (he of the mismatched floral shirts and trousers), who proposed just one concert in 2022 as a one-off tribute to that ‘Shadows and Light’ tour. The band has continued to carry on touring and performing ever since and, for this gig, comprised Dave Jones on fretted and fretless bass (a doppelgänger for Pastorius), Tom Hooper on drums, Chris Eldred on keyboards, Marc Cecil on a baffling but delightful array of percussive instruments and Mark Lockheart, in the vanguard of British jazz for four decades, on saxophones and bass clarinet. With great style and polish they all brought Joni Mitchell’s music to life in the most sensitive way, giving each other space to extemporise individually, yet threading together beautifully to perfect those highly complex compositions.
One of my favourite passages was the trio of numbers lifted from ‘Shadows and Light’, played in the same order as on the album. The first was an exquisite rendition of ‘Amelia’, which interweaves two stories: a desert journey undertaken by Joni and the legend of the famous aviator Amelia Earhart, who mysteriously vanished during a flight over the Pacific Ocean. Hattie then left the stage while Pete Oxley recreated, in minute detail, Pat Metheny’s hugely challenging guitar solo before she returned to sing ‘Hejira’ itself, which Joni described as "probably the toughest tune on the album to write.”
After introducing us to this brilliant collection of musicians, Hattie thanked us for sharing the evening with them. “It’s such special music and an honour to play it,” she said, “but it really makes all the difference to play it to an audience full of people who share the enthusiasm for the music.” And that brought us to the last song of the evening, the bittersweet ‘A Case of You’ from Joni’s haunting ‘Blue’ album, from an earlier era. I hadn’t expected a song from my favourite album of hers. Hattie sang it beautifully and it was the perfect end to a triumph for the Shropshire Music Trust, whose artistic director John Moore, with his keen eye for the exceptional, had managed to secure a performance for us all to luxuriate in and remember for a long time.
