Nu Civilisation Orchestra offer Joni Mitchell night in Brighton

Led by Peter Edwards and featuring vocalist and multi-instrumentalist and Tomorrow’s Warriors ex-student ESKA, they will be presenting the music of two legends: Joni Mitchell, through her classic, jazz-influenced album Hejira, and her later work with pioneering jazz legend Charles Mingus.

When Joni Mitchell released Hejira in 1976, she was already established as one of the great voices of her generation. Hejira saw Mitchell embark on a new journey, away from her folk roots, towards the freer, jazz-inspired music of her later work. By 1978, her jazz-influenced work was pushed further through an unlikely collaboration with one of the most imposing jazz musicians to ever take the stage, Charles Mingus. Mitchell’s Mingus took the great man’s compositions as the inspiration for her own lyrics.

Pianist, composer and musical director Peter will lead the 19-piece Nu Civilisation Orchestra in Brighton: “To be honest, it started off when I first did work on Joni Mitchell for the Women Of The World Festival which was in 2017,” Peter says. “Joni’s work was really appropriate for the festival and as the orchestra we like to look at artists who are more well known for one particular type of music but then do something rather more experimental. Joni’s album Hejira fitted us really well because she had a lot of jazz influences by then and she was working with people like Herbie Hancock. Most people know her earlier albums like Blue and the more singer-songwriter folk albums of earlier. But then she started to delve more into jazz… and so we did that and it was a really great opportunity and we really enjoyed performing it. And so it was like when can we do something like this again? But we were thinking that if we were going to do it again we had to perform something more and so we started putting together proposals for performances and just different ideas. And after doing that a bit more we found that there was this album of hers called Mingus. A few years after Hejira she had an audience with Charles Mingus in the later years of his life and he gave her almost like a challenge to go away and work on some of this stuff and again she drew on the forces of jazz. I was really intrigued because I just didn't know about that period. She was working on some incredible jazz and some incredible performances, and it really just brought out a different side to her and again that really fitted with what we were doing.

“The orchestra is based in London and came out of the Tomorrow’s Warriors artist development programme. It was part of that working mainly with pre-college students and students that were already at college and giving them more experience and more opportunities for various workshops and learning more about artist development.

"The orchestra really came out of a conversation that I had with the artistic director Gary Crosby. I was talking to him about a project that I was doing looking into Duke Ellington's Queens Suite and I was doing a lot of transcribing and Gary said if I wanted to get some people together to play some of it, then use some of the alumni.”