Depending on the day, Herbie Hancock might perform any number of roles. He’s the nation’s first-call jazz ambassador, a futuristic technology advocate, a dedicated educator, and of course, an American music luminary. Most of all, like all great artists he makes things new again. He did it for us with The New Standard, when he found the swing and the meaning in pop classics. He did it with his kaleidoscopic take on Gershwin’s World—and took home three Grammy® awards for it.

Yet for all Hancock’s accomplishments both in and out of music, there’s one thing he’d never done. “I had never thought about lyrics before,” he says. “Never.”

River: The Joni Letters is 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.”

To understand the richly allusive connection among melody, harmony and poetry in Mitchell’s work, Hancock enlisted the help of producer Larry Klein, Mitchell’s long-time collaborator. “We sat together for a long time, months before we actually recorded the record,” Klein says. “We just listened to the songs and looked at the lyrics together. We would discuss song origins, allegorical stuff Joni had told me or in other cases leave the interpretation nebulous, as it was meant to be. This was a whole new world for Herbie to be thinking in.”

Hancock then assembled a group of the world’s top musicians, including the incomparable Wayne Shorter on soprano and tenor sax, the brilliant bassist and composer Dave Holland, (a musical cohort of Hancock and Shorter’s who shares their adventurousness, as well as the Miles Davis imprimatur), drummer Vinnie Colaiuta (a recent member of Hancock’s band as well as having played extensively with Mitchell and Sting), and Benin-born guitarist Lionel Loueke, also a member of Hancock’s band.