On a sold-out night at the Oxford Playhouse, the acclaimed Joni Mitchell tribute band Hejira played their 100th show in the venue where they first performed together, two and a half years ago. The group was founded by guitarist Pete Oxley, who runs The Spin jazz club in Oxford, together with Stuart Miller. Since then, the seven-piece band has been touring the UK and Ireland with a repertoire spanning Joni Mitchell’s jazz-influenced albums of the ’70s, focusing especially on the legendary 1979 live album Shadows and Light.

“Hejira – Celebrating the music of Joni Mitchell” momentarily drowned out the city’s buzzing student life as the hand-held fans and carefully-clutched crutches of a different generation flocked into the Playhouse on the hottest day of the year so far. Elderly ladies who barely had enough strength in their voice to greet old school friends at the theatre were cheering at the top of their lungs during the solos as if they were teenage girls again; and even those whose hands were too shaky to open a bottle of water made sure to clap along without missing a single beat.

There can be, at times, an uncanny quality about cover bands and their technically skilled imitation of something that nevertheless remains strikingly absent: an era, an atmosphere – something which is meant to be alive, not just in a laborious state of reanimation. But this show excelled in organically elevating imitation into pure celebration. Instead of attempting to copy her, the band channelled Mitchell’s spirit and allowed it to roam as playfully as the free flowing “rock ’n rolling” of “In France They Kiss On Main Street” and as contemplatively as the critical “The Hissing of Summer Lawns”. The music is given room to breathe and linger here while the guitarist and vocalist Hattie Whitehead performs all ten verses of “Song for Sharon” with such ease and confidence you would think she were recounting her own stories of walking home on railroad tracks in cowgirl jeans “chasing, chasing dreams.”

Ollie Weston’s warm soprano saxophone soulfully melts into Whitehead’s full voice, as both of them evoke Mitchell in tone, inflection, and dynamics. Whitehead moves through the many vocal registers and mid-melody key changes like hair in the wind, keeping the audience hanging on her every word as though they hadn´t known those lyrics by heart long before Whitehead even knew how to play the guitar. Championing the charming lightness and churning depth of Mitchell’s music, the band captures the simultaneous free fall and soft land of her jazz journeys so mesmerizingly that the songs unfold with the same adventurous pulse as though being played for the first time, against the backdrop of the decades of memory and meaning amassed by the audience. The three centerpieces of Shadows and Light merge into each other in Hejira’s performance, just as they did in Mitchell’s original live tour: “Amelia”, “Pat´s Solo” and “Hejira” reverberated in a room that was stunned into silence, before erupting in applause. 

Breaking this illusion of the 70s, Hejira performed some of their own original arrangements in the concluding section of the show. It was a rightful reminder that these are musicians in their own right and time, which was quickly appreciated and admired with a warm and welcoming reception.

The show closed with “A Case of You”, the first track by Mitchell that Whitehead had ever learned to play, and a song whose lyrics perfectly encapsulated the moment: “I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet.” It seems that, across generations, the audience cannot get enough of her music, as Mitchell’s original fans continue to show up and new generations of musicians continue her legacy.

Those who could not attend but would still like to get a taste of Hejira’s interpretations will soon be able to purchase the live album recorded during the show at the Oxford Playhouse – a purchase which I can only recommend.  The “case” of Joni Mitchell’s music is something this band most certainly pours generously and exhilaratingly.

[“Hejira – Celebrating the music of Joni Mitchell” performed at the Oxford Playhouse, 30 June].