November 2022: Nu Civilisation Orchestra led by Peter Edwards and featuring ESKA on vocals set out on a national tour exploring of the music of Joni Mitchell, through her jazz influenced classic album Hejira and her later encounter with the pioneering jazz legend, Charles Mingus.  

The tour visited six cities across the UK, including London’s Southbank Centre during EFG London Jazz Festival, plus Liverpool, Brighton, Poole, Bristol and Sunderland.

With a canon of work including eight studio albums, Mitchell was already established as one of the great voices of her generation by the time she released Hejira in the late autumn of 1976. This was Mitchell embarking on a journey away from her lighter, folk roots towards the freer, jazz-inspired music of her later recordings. By 1978, Mitchell’s move into deeper jazz influences was suddenly pushed further through an unlikely collaboration with one of the most imposing jazz musicians and arrangers ever to take to the stage: Charles Mingus.  

Mitchell’s Mingus took the great man’s compositions as the inspiration for her own lyrics, and she recorded with Jaco Pastorius and members of Weather Report. The result stands as one of the most emotionally intense and unexpected of musical collaborations.  

Entering the lyrically charged vocal realm of Mitchell for these performances is TW alumna ESKA, the London-born British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.  The Mercury Prize nominee had already built a reputation as a singer through her work with Grace Jones and Bobby McFerrin before the launch of her acclaimed eponymous album in 2015 and was described by Gilles Peterson as “one of the most important singers in the UK right now”.