A story so incredible it seems invented. Jimi Hendrix is ​​in Ottawa for a concert with his Experience at the Capitol Theatre but on the evening of March 19, 1968 he and his companions, Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, have no commitments. Hendrix decides to go see Joni Mitchell in concert at a coffee house, Le Hibou.

He has a tape recorder with him and before the concert he introduces himself to the singer-songwriter: "My name is Jimi Hendrix, I just got signed to Reprise, the same label that signed you. Can I record your concert?" Joni, who would release her debut album Song to a Seagull in a few days, says yes. Hendrix places himself with his tape recorder under the stage and doesn't move for the entire set, checking tones and volumes and adjusting them, to have the best possible recording, looking up from the tape a few times - Joni Mitchell recalled - just to smile at her.

The recording has been rediscovered 53 years later and will be released on October 29 as the second installment of the Joni Mitchell Archives, the first volume of which, Early Years, was released in the fall of 2020. The chances of the recording surviving were slim. Hendrix's tape recorder and tape were stolen the following day, as Mitch Mitchell recalled in his memoir, and no one ever heard from the songs again.

Instead, the tape had mysteriously ended up in the hands of Richard Patterson, a musician, manager and radio programmer from Ottawa for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, who had jealously guarded it over the years, without ever programming it on the radio, without ever letting anyone listen to it.

A few years ago his friend and colleague Ian McLeish helped him sort out his tape collection, a job he continues to do after Patterson's death. And it was during this last period that McLeish came across a tape with the words "Joni Mitchell, recorded live at Le Hibou Mar/68" written on it.

It is the complete Hendrix recording: the testimony, of excellent quality, of an excellent set by a twenty-four year old Joni Mitchell in a state of grace, who despite not having yet released her debut album proposes some songs that will then appear in her following albums. Seventeen songs, one unreleased until today, The way it is, three that did not enter the album that will be released in October.

At the end of the show, Jimi and Joni, along with Mitch Mitchell, went together to the Motel de Ville, in Vanier, to listen to music, smoke, chat, often interrupted by some hotel security guard who did not look favorably on them, "he did not like the idea of ​​three hippies, one of them even black, alone in a room in that conservative hotel", Joni Mitchell recalls. When Hendrix returns to his hotel, he notes in his diary: "I went to a little club to see Joni, a fantastic girl with words of heaven. We hung out together listening to music and smoking in the hotel". And the next day: "We left Ottawa City today, I kissed Joni goodbye".

It really happened, and it was possible because in those years the community of rock musicians was a community of young creative people who - especially in California - tended to live together, to hang out constantly, exchanging experiences and music. Until the previous year the center had been San Francisco where, for example, the Grateful Dead's house at 710 Ashbury Street had become a collector of life and collective experience.

In 1968, everything was moving to Los Angeles, where the Laurel Canyon area was home to Frank Zappa, Carole King, James Taylor, the Mamas and the Papas, Jim Morrison, Jackson Browne, part of those who would soon become the Eagles, but above all David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash who, having arrived from England, would never leave the US. On the other side of the country, in the Woodstock area, lived Bob Dylan, the Band, Van Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix himself.

All twenty-year-olds, they played together, attended each other's concerts, participated in each other's records, wrote the future of music in a legendary season in many ways. After finding the tape, McLeish sent it, last April, to Joni Mitchell's management: the artist, surprised and happy, gave the ok to Rhino Records for the publication. In October, a Joni Mitchell record recorded by Jimi Hendrix on a March evening in 1968 will be released.