When Herbie Hancock's album, "River: The Joni Letters," won the Grammy for Album of the Year in February, everyone was asking: How could a jazz album win?
The only other jazz disc to snag the top award was "Getz/Gilberto," by Stan Getz and João Gilberto, in 1964.
But the less obvious story was that a jazz artist of Hancock's caliber chose to seriously engage the work of a contemporary singer-songwriter. That it was Joni Mitchell, one of the best, is our great good fortune, the way we are lucky Sinatra recorded with Basie and Ella Fitzgerald sang the tunes of Harold Arlen.
"She's a real renaissance person," said Hancock in a phone interview. "She's not only a great poet and songwriter, but she's a wonderful painter and she's directed films and she recently wrote a ballet."
Hancock, who performs at Benaroya Hall on Wednesday, deserves a great deal of credit, not only for choosing this project, but for doing it so well.
Hancock has been blessed with the popular touch since his first album as a leader, "Takin' Off " (1963), which featured his composition "Watermelon Man," a monster hit for Mongo Santamaria. In the '70s, Hancock hit big again, with the irresistibly funky "Chameleon," and the '80s brought the film "'Round Midnight" and the MTV hit "Rockit."
That Hancock sells lots of records is even more remarkable when you consider he is one of the three most influential pianists of the 1960s, the other two being Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. A sliver of the general public may recall Evans' lovely "Waltz for Debby," but neither he nor Tyner ever had a hit record.
Artistically, however, Hancock has been floundering on disc of late. "Future2Future" (2001) was the musical equivalent of cheesy science fiction, and "Possibilities," a potpourri of singer-songwriters that can be seen now as a run-up to "River," was glossy and superficial.
But "River," a critical and popular success, hits the mark, transporting Mitchell's quirky, moody ruminations to a new world of jazz art song. It's received uniformly rave reviews and has spent 28 weeks at the No. 1 slot on the Billboard contemporary jazz charts.
The album was born one night while Hancock was still working on "Possibilities." Hancock and Mitchell, longtime friends, had gone to a party given by Prince. The two wound up staying up all night, talking about music, philosophy, politics and the possibility of "doing something different."
"It wasn't like I was the typical Joni Mitchell fan," said Hancock. "I never really paid that much attention to her lyrics. Once I got into them, what surprised me was that she was writing brilliant lyrics from day one."
At the recording session, Hancock handed the lyrics to the musicians.
"We sat there and discussed them for 10 or 15 minutes," he said.
"River" emphasizes classic Mitchell themes of loneliness and loss, rootlessness, doomed relationships and — her specialty, best expressed in the classic, "Both Sides Now" — the conflation of dreams with reality.
Though both Hancock and Mitchell are Buddhists, he said it was not Mitchell's sense of the cycle of life and death that attracted him to her songs, but her stands on social issues and uprightness of character.
"She's a person who stands up for what she believes in and doesn't back down," he said.
Though "River" features Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Norah Jones, Leonard Cohen, Luciana Souza and Mitchell herself, one of its most intriguing tracks is a wildly abstracted, reharmonized piano version of "Both Sides Now."
"Most of that was written out," said Hancock. "I worked on it for several days."
The cut is emblematic of the album's success, in that it delves deeply into Mitchell's world, taking it apart, then putting it back together again — a true reimagining.
"In college, Herbie was in engineering," recalled Seattle-based trombonist Julian Priester, who played with Hancock in the great '70s group Mwandishi. "He's a tinkerer. He likes to get inside of things. This album is an expression of that. It's amazing. Everyone seems inspired."
On tour, Hancock is joined by Sonya Kitchell, an expressive, Mitchell-influenced singer-songwriter whose version of Mitchell's "All I Want" is featured on the Amazon.com version of "River." (It can also be viewed, with Kitchell and Hancock performing live, at www.myspace.com/sonyakitchell.) Amy Keyes, who has done a lot of background singing, recently with Paul Simon, also sings on the tour.
Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com
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