Joni&Jaco

There’s something magical when two geniuses meet and tune in their talents and unique abilities. When that happens, magic happens. Joni Mitchell and Jaco Pastorius were a match made in heaven. Oh, they weren’t lovers but a music match made in heaven… well, at least in America in the seventies. Both advanced musicians, they were also one of the strongest creative forces around in that time. Jaco was revolutionizing the electric bass playing, leaving an unprecedented mark in jazz history, while Joni was there to erase the borders between genres, so heavily guarded by the music industry, blending jazz, folk, and rock as if they were made for each other.

This song called “Refuge On the Road” is from the album “Hejira,” recorded and released in 1976. The name comes from the Arabic “hijra” which means “journey” - the album was written during or after three journeys she took in late 1975 and the first half of 1976: a stint on the Rolling Thunder Revue with Bob Dylan in late 1975 when she became a frequent cocaine user, a concert tour cancelled after six weeks in February 1976 when Mitchell and drummer John Guerin ended their relationship, and a road trip Mitchell undertook shortly after the tour with two men, one of them a former lover from Australia, that inspired six of the songs on the album. After recording the tracks, she met bassist Jaco Pastorius, and they formed an immediate musical connection. At that time, Mitchell was dissatisfied with what she called the "dead, distant bass sound" of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was beginning to wonder why the bass part always had to play the root of a chord. She overdubbed his bass parts on four of the tracks on Hejira, one of them being this beautiful track. Enjoy!