Following her romantic split with jazz drummer John Guerin, Mitchell took a head-clearing road trip and began writing the album that would be called Hejira. Tellingly, its Arabic-derived title translates to a verb meaning “to run away honorably” or, more specifically, Mohammad’s flight from the danger of Mecca, where he was to be assassinated, to the safety of Medina. This bold, and brilliant album daringly re-contextualizes disparate elements — jazz, poetry, ambient, folk — in real time; the result is fusion not in the traditional sense, but more literally defined, perhaps closer to the way we might now apply the word to cuisine. Then there’s Jaco. Tales of legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius’s ritual of lubricating his fingers with fried chicken grease are probably apocryphal, but listening to his playing on Hejira, which sounds less like an electric bass than the groaning, growling accompaniment of a singing whale, you almost begin to smell the Extra Crispy. No wonder Pastorius, who played by ear rather than using charts, spoiled Mitchell for other bassists: on the evidence of Hejira, the two were born to play together. Jaco’s visceral, melodic lines purr at each high-wire vocal melody, lending these songs of escape and insignificance both their counterpoint and their crucial tension; they’re practically duets. The rest of the albums hangs together by soft threads that seem to float in some alien, borderless, narcotic space all its own. It’s telling that though Jaco appears on only four of Hejira’s nine songs, his presence is felt even during those on which he does not appear. As for the songs themselves, they are each, in their own way, perfect. “Amelia” begins with Mitchell likening six plumes of jet engine smoke to the strings on her guitar, an observation that leads her to compare herself to the doomed pilot of its title, who, like Mitchell, is vexed by the unrealized promise of salvation — a “false alarm.” On the jazzy “Blue Motel Room,” Mitchell is charming as she proposes armistice, likening a cold lover to the Cold War. Hejira’s songs may appear, at first, to lack structure, but in fact it is only Mitchell’s disregard for conventional structure that allows these carefully constructed modal meditations to exist. Note how the title track modulates back and forth between the keys of B and D major, never settling on one, or how “Black Crow” and “Furry Sings The Blues” place single-line refrains where a chorus might be expected. Everything is by design; like Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, Hejira’s greatest success is its ability to sound like improvisation when it is anything but. The album culminates with the throbbing, exquisite “Refuge Of The Roads,” a song that contains some of the most personal and beautiful poetry to ever spill from Mitchell’s pen: “In a highway service station/ over the month of June/ was a photograph of the Earth/ taken coming back from the moon/ And you couldn’t see a city/ or that marbled bowling ball/ or a forest of a highway/ or me here least of all.” These are songs that prove that solitude needn’t succumb to isolation; that aloneness does not always mean loneliness. As with Blue, to reduce Hejira to a mere collection of songs defeats its purpose. If there’s ever been an album that demanded to be heard as a complete work of art on its own terms, it is Hejira; not a day goes by that I’m not glad it exists.