Joni Mitchell in Amsterdam, Netherlands. 1972/Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
The album Hejira is the variation of the world ‘hijra’, which literally means ‘journey/migration’ in Arabic. Hijra is the journey that the prophet Muhammad took from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. The year of the hijra was marked as the first year of the Islamic lunar calendar, and it is also what starts the Iranian solar calendar. Canadian folk singer Joni Mitchell was not a Muslim, but having come across the word, she used it for a title of her eighth album of 1976 that also became sort of a new starting point for her. By that point, by her own admission, she was sick of rock musicians and was leaning more and more towards jazz. This album features a giant of the jazz world, the bass player Jaco Pastorius, and her 1979 album, composed in collaboration with the greatest jazz double bass player of all time, Charles Mingus, was named after him. Apart from this sound ‘rebirth’, the vinyl reflects on the subject of wandering and ambivalence that the singer went through prior to recording it. In order to avoid being recognized she traveled wearing a red wig and introduced herself as Joanne Black.
She was sexually adventurous and also became addicted to cocaine, but she later found healing from the addiction after meeting a Tibetan Buddhist. Despite this very telling history, Mitchell insisted she was never a hippy and that she used to eagerly perform at American military bases. The piece ‘Hejira’ was composed and performed so naturally that it creates the sense of a journey by itself. Pastorius’s guiding bass appears to be marking the calendar. The lunar calendar day starts at the point of sunset and not at midnight, and this song is perfect for greeting the sunset as the sign of renewal, especially bearing in mind that during her travels, Mitchell did not have a driving licence so she traveled only in daytime, driving behind lorries so they could alert her to any police on the road.