Janiece Jaffe’s final gift:

Both Sides of Joni

It was a privilege to work with Janiece Jaffe on reimaging Joni Mitchell’s music over the past two years. Janiece’s vision was to share Joni’s message and help us make sense of the world during times of uncertainties. The album “Both Sides of Joni” is Janiece’s final gift to us. We will release the album in March 2023 and celebrate Janiece’s legacy on stages worldwide. Her family would like to request any gifts in Janiece’s memory to go towards the costs of final production, promotion, and touring of her legacy album. Thank you for making Janiece’s dream come true.

From the liner notes:

This album is, first and foremost, about relationships: between Janiece and Monika; between the stretch of time that gave rise to Joni’s songs and the ones we’re living through now; and, most of all, between Janiece and these lyrics. She sings them in a pure and transparent voice, sometimes overdubbing the harmonies she once only imagined, and she moves through a variety of moods: reflective on “Both Sides Now”; startlingly direct on “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow”; with swinging aplomb on “My Old Man”; longingly, on “River,” her yearning teased out by Dutton’s violin; and, in the middle of “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” seizing upon the word “darkness,” and then sings wordlessly, in the improvisational style she studied with Bobby McFerrin and Rhiannon, a master teacher, and leading the ensemble into freer terrain. She’s “hanging out with the jazzers,” just like she used to, just like Joni so famously and brilliantly did. And she’s revealing both sides of herself—the girl who heard Joni’s songs and wanted to make them her own, and the woman who now leans on them to, like the rest of us, try to make sense of it all.  

—Larry Blumenfeld