C-G-D-F-G-C

• OVERVIEW •

Joni Mitchell’s setting for the divine arpeggiations of Hejira, released on her 1976 album of the same name. The title derives from an Arabic word (hijra / الهجرة), signifying ‘departure’ or ‘migration’ – particularly the Prophet Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina. Joni came across the term while flicking through an Arabic dictionary (in her description, she was “drawn to the dangling j”) – loosely interpreting it to signify a sense of “rupture, or running away with honour”.

 

Her tuning equates to ‘DADGAD -2, with 4str +2‘. It invites a running, rolling style, with a wide mix of adjacent intervals (one major 2nd, one minor 2nd, one 4th, and two 5ths) – ideal for Hejira’s complex, cascading arpeggio motions. Assuming no restring, the tension profile resembles a ‘mountain’ – i.e. the outer strings are slackened further than the middle, meaning they retain more punch and volume.

Pattern: 7>7>3>2>5

Harmony: Csus2/4 | 1-5-2-4-5-1

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

Joni’s fascination for blending folksy melodising with nuanced jazz harmony reached its supreme heights on her collaborations with Jaco Pastorius – an extraordinary creative force, regularly (and I’d say justifiably) described as ‘Hendrix of the fretless bass’. She describes the impulses that led to their partnership:

 

“I’d tried all along to add other musicians…nearly every bass player that I tried did the same thing: they would put up a dark picket fence through my music, and I thought, ‘why does it have to go ploddy ploddy ploddy?’ Finally one guy said to me, ‘Joni, you better play with jazz musicians’.”

 

Jaco arranged several sublime bass parts for the Hejira album (including his first experiments with overdubbing: something he would later apply live with a loop pedal). For me, the title track remains the perfect blend of their sonorities, with four separate bass tracks providing a silky-smooth canvas for Joni’s two almost-identical guitar parts.

 

---

• Hejira – Joni Mitchell (1976):

---

“You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line…”

---

 

For the guitar part, Joni turned to a tuning she had used two years earlier, on 1974’s Love or Money (she would also return to it on 1988’s My Secret Place). Other aspects of the creation process, however, proved more challenging – she describes it as “probably the toughest tune on the album to write“, with wistful lyrics explicitly themed around her recent breakup with jazz-rock drummer John Guerin (…although three tracks later, on Blue Motel Room, she muses on whether the relationship could be rekindled: this time in C-G-D-F-A-D).

 

Improv actor and (former) jazz drummer Jason Mantzoukas, who once travelled Arabic North Africa as part of a chaotic post-college musical project, cites Hejira as his all-time favourite album: “One of the central components of this record…is Jaco’s heartbreaking, plaintive bass work…You’ve got all of these jazz musicians willing to explore with Joni – it’s an amazing record that delves into all of these topics in a way that is exploratory, and seems to have a freedom and languidness that previous Joni Mitchell records just didn’t have.”

 

---

• Hejira (‘Joni’s Jam’) – Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Bobby McFerrin, Wayne Shorter, David Sanborn, & Larry Klein (1987):

---

“Well, I looked at the granite markers,

Those tributes to finality, to eternity,

And then I looked at myself here,

Chicken-scratching for my immortality…“

---

• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	C	G	D	F	G	C
Alteration	-4	-2	0	-2	-4	-4
Tension (%)	-37	-21	0	-21	-37	-37
Freq. (Hz)	65	98	147	175	196	262
Pattern (>)	7	7	3	2	5	–
Semitones	0	7	14	17	19	24
Intervals	1	5	2	4	5	1

• See my Tunings Megatable for further such nerdery: more numbers, intervallic relations, comparative methods, etc. And to any genuine vibratory scientists reading: please critique my DIY analysis!

• RELATED •

—Associated tunings: proximities of shape, concept, context, etc…

• Coyote: this time Joni winds the high side upwards
• Open Fm: many contrasting moods, not so far away
• C Standard: loosen away the mountain of tension

• MORE INFO •

—Further learnings: sources, readings, lessons, other onward links…

• Joni’s tunings: read more about her intriguing approaches to winding the pegs in my article Stringed canvas: Joni Mitchell’s musico-visual imagination (“If songwriting entails the selection of chords, melodies, and lyrics, then why not consciously craft your tunings too? For Joni, it makes no sense to skip this step – after all, what painter would stick to the same six colour pots, when a near-infinite selection lie within arm’s reach?”)
• Hijra in Islamic culture: learn about the word’s origins, via tales of the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. (“the event from which the Islamic calendar reckons…from Medieval Latin hegira, from Arabic hijra – ‘departure’ – from hajara – ‘to depart’…”)

---

Header image: Hejira’s iconic album art (by Norman Seeff)