There is a version of Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard” on this record that will stop you mid-sip and make you put your glass down.
Norah Jones sings it. She sounds like she means every word of it. And Herbie Hancock, playing behind her, sounds like he’s been thinking about that song for thirty years — because he has.
River: The Joni Letters came out in 2007 on Verve, and it won the Grammy for Album of the Year, which surprised almost everyone and offended a few people who thought an album this quiet and this jazz had no business being in that conversation. They were wrong. This record deserved every bit of it.
The Concept, and Why It Works
The premise is simple: Hancock, one of the great jazz pianists alive, takes a collection of Joni Mitchell’s songs and a handful of compositions written in her spirit, and he works through them with a rotating cast of singers and his own core band. Mitchell herself appears twice — on “Tea Leaf Prophecy” and “Both Sides Now” — and her voice, older and smokier than it was in 1969, carries a weight that the younger version simply couldn’t have managed.
What makes it work is restraint. Hancock does not jazz these songs to death. He does not use them as launching pads for runs and flourishes designed to prove something. He plays with them, the way a careful reader annotates a poem rather than rewrites it.
The album was recorded at Capitol Studios in Hollywood — the same room where Sinatra cut half his masterpieces, where the acoustics are warm and the ghost of ambition is in the walls. Larry Klein produced it, which matters: Klein was married to Mitchell for eight years, co-produced Dog Eat Dog and Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm with her, and understands her harmonic language the way a translator understands idiom. He kept everything in the room feeling lived-in rather than pristine.
The Band, and What They Did
Drummer Vinnie Colaiuta is on most of this record, and he is the reason the rhythm section never once feels intrusive. Colaiuta is the kind of drummer who makes you forget drums are present at all — and on an album this delicate, that is the entire job. Dave Holland plays bass on several tracks, bringing that unmistakable elasticity he’s had since Miles was still alive and paying attention.
Lionel Loueke plays guitar throughout, and his dry, interlocking lines give the record a texture that resists easy categorization. He’s the detail you notice on the third listen.
The other vocalists — Tina Turner on “Edith and the Kingpin,” Joni herself, Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae on “River” — were each matched to material that fit them rather than challenged them toward something foreign. That’s a production choice, not a compromise. The result is that everyone sounds at home.
Corinne Bailey Rae on the title track is the other moment where the record fully opens up. Her reading of “River” is not the folk lament you grew up with on Blue. It’s slower, more interior, more aware of loss as something permanent rather than seasonal. Hancock barely touches the keys behind her. The space he leaves is doing half the work.
Wayne Shorter plays soprano saxophone on two tracks and his presence raises the temperature of the whole project. He and Hancock have been in conversation, musically, since the second Miles quintet. When they share a song, there is fifty years of trust in the room.
This is a record for late nights and careful listening systems. Not background music. Not dinner party music. The kind of album that asks something small of you — just attention — and returns it with interest.