name was either "Charlene Latimer" or "Joan Black". Despite the disguise, Mitchell was still sometimes recognized. During the recording of her albums Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mitchell grew increasingly frustrated by the rock session musicians who had been hired to perform her music. "...There were grace notes and subtleties and things that I thought were getting kind of buried." The session musicians in turn recommended that Mitchell start looking for jazz instrumentalists to perform on her records. In addition, her relationship with drummer John Guerin (which lasted through a significant portion of the mid-1970s) influenced her decision to move more towards experimental jazz music and further away from her folk and pop roots. After recording the basic tracks that would become Hejira, Mitchell met bassist Jaco Pastorius and they formed an immediate musical connection; Mitchell was dissatisfied with what she called the "dead, distant bass sound" of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was beginning to wonder why the bass part always had to play the root of a chord. She overdubbed his bass parts on four of the tracks on Hejira and released the album in November 1976. Dominated by Mitchell's guitar and Pastorius's fretless bass, the album drew on a range of influences but was more cohesive and accessible than some of her later more jazz-oriented work. "Coyote", "Amelia", and "Hejira" became concert staples especially after being featured on the live album Shadows and Light alongside "Furry Sings the Blues" and "Black Crow". Album title The album title is an unusual transliteration of the Arabic word more commonly rendered as Hegira or Hijra, which means "departure or exodus", usually referring to the migration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (and his companions) from Mecca to Medina in 622. Mitchell later stated that when she chose the title, she was looking for a word that meant "running away with honor". She found the word "hejira" while reading the dictionary, and was drawn to the "dangling j, like in Aja... it's leaving the dream, no blame". Cover art The portrait of Mitchell on the front cover was taken by Norman Seeff and the other photographs were taken by Joel Bernstein at Lake Mendota, in Madison, Wisconsin, after an ice storm. Figure skater Toller Cranston appears on the back cover. During a 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, Mitchell cited the cover of Hejira as one of which