Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada. While primarily known as a singer-songwriter, her mid-to-late-1970s work moved directly into jazz collaboration, a shift that produced three studio albums and, decades later, one of jazz's biggest annual honors.

It began with 1976's Hejira (Asylum), recorded during a period of near-constant travel and built around fretless bassist Jaco Pastorius, whose playing on "Coyote," "Hejira," "Black Crow," and "Refuge of the Roads" gave the record its floating, harmonically loose character; guitarist Larry Carlton, drummer John Guerin, and vibraphonist Victor Feldman filled out the studio band. The following year's double LP Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977, Asylum) pushed further into jazz territory, bringing in four members of Weather Report — Pastorius, Alex Acuña, Manolo Badrena, and, for the first time on a Mitchell record, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. Shorter's soprano saxophone appears on "Jericho" and the side-long "Paprika Plains"; the album's percussion-driven "The Tenth World" also features Chaka Khan and percussionist Don Alias.

Mitchell's most significant jazz statement came through her relationship with bassist and composer Charles Mingus, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. In the last months of his life, Mingus called upon Mitchell to help set music to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, a project that was ultimately scrapped but served as the catalyst for her 1979 album Mingus (Asylum), on which she set words to new and existing Mingus compositions; Mingus died of ALS on January 5, 1979, before the album was completed. For the sessions, Mitchell assembled an all-star jazz cast confirmed on the album's own credits: Jaco Pastorius on bass, Herbie Hancock on electric piano, Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone, drummer Peter Erskine, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, and percussionist Don Alias.

She carried that jazz-fusion band on the road, and the results became her second live album, Shadows and Light (1980, Asylum), recorded September 9, 1979, at the Santa Barbara County Bowl. The touring group, confirmed via the album's own credits, was a jazz supergroup in its own right: guitarist Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius again on bass, drummer Don Alias, keyboardist Lyle Mays, and saxophonist Michael Brecker. Her broader "Asylum Albums" period, 1976-1980, documents her sustained collaboration with these and other major jazz figures.

That thread resurfaced nearly three decades later on the other side of the ledger. In 2007, Herbie Hancock released River: The Joni Letters (Verve), a tribute album of Mitchell compositions performed by his working band of the time — Wayne Shorter on saxophones, bassist Dave Holland, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and guitarist Lionel Loueke — with a rotating cast of vocalists that included Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, and Mitchell herself, who sings lead on "Tea Leaf Prophecy (Lay Down Your Arms)," an autobiographical song about her parents' wartime courtship. The album won two Grammy Awards in February 2008, including Album of the Year — only the second jazz record ever to take that award, after Stan Getz and João Gilberto's Getz/Gilberto in 1965.

Mitchell's deliberate turn toward jazz composition and improvisation in the mid-to-late 1970s ran across three consecutive studio albums — Hejira, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, and Mingus — each pulling in more of the era's leading jazz-fusion players, from Jaco Pastorius's melodic bass work to Wayne Shorter's soprano saxophone, and culminating in her direct creative partnership with Charles Mingus in the final months of his life. That body of work was substantial enough that it drew jazz's own tribute nearly thirty years later, when Herbie Hancock built an Album of the Year-winning record entirely around her songs, with Shorter again at the center of the band. Few singer-songwriters have prompted, and then received, a reciprocal jazz collaboration of that scale.