River: The Joni Letters is Herbie Hancock’s journey into the world of words, his initiation as a man of letters. “I wanted the lyrics to be the foundation for this whole project, for everything to stem from the lyrics and their meaning.”

“What I have done before in projects is to take someone else’s song that I like and re-harmonize it,” says Hancock, who helped pioneer post-bop jazz, in which lyrics are usually a creative point of departure. “Before I set out to do that on this record, I figured I better find out what Joni did and why Joni did what she did with the melodies. Because if the melodies took a certain direction, knowing her, she took those twists and turns and used certain devices based on what’s happening in the lyrics. She’s a master at that.”

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