🔗 Share this article

My conversation with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. This occurred during the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette was visiting London for a series of concerts with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my initial question as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being categorized and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, a moment of pure enchantment captivated the audience as Jarrett held a long sequence of repeated notes high on the piano and DeJohnette propelled the sound with a complex percussion display as melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette told me, “is tied up in the very essence of being. We don’t anticipate life unfolding without transformation and we never know what lies ahead – why should music be any different?”

He went on to clarify that each part of his drum kit he considered to be a musical being “in its own right.” He designed and tuned his cymbals to his own specification. Combine the tones of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he added. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the traditional rules of percussion. He was also a pianist of significant talent – who issued a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship seemed to be on display all of the time, until his passing at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Artistic Performance

Many drummers tune their kit to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing radiated a vitality that was entirely his own. Listening to his performance on “What I Say” from Miles Davis’s album Live-Evil is to be amazed by seemingly boundless energy as he maintained an impactful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who also played on Davis’s epoch-defining Bitches Brew, had by 1970 emerged as Davis’s preferred percussionist in a meeting of mighty musical minds. His drums rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and allowed Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance with complex percussive interjections – keeping a continual discussion with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, immediately proposed that his was a style deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he remained doggedly independent. The pieces DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and embodied a fusion vibe while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing a wind instrument, and his rustic tune creations soared.

The DeJohnette Complex revealed that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex and, after leaving Davis, he joined ECM Records. In 1976 he issued Untitled, a energetic five-piece record, but also Pictures in which he performed on multiple instruments, and duetted on some tracks with guitarist John Abercrombie, an album that was minimalist and stripped-down in contrast to Untitled.

Landmark Collaborations and Key Albums

His 1981 ECM album with saxophonist John Surman, The Amazing Adventures of Simon Simon, became a landmark moment for both musicians, and a much-loved classic too. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also adding electronic elements, subsuming their own identities inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes of pastoral tones. Another essential album was Oneness, recorded in 1997, which presented expansive forms with pieces such as “Free Above Sea” and “Priestesses of the Mist,” their titles reflecting the primal energy unleashed by the music. Hearing that work around the time of its release, it recalled an earlier encounter with DeJohnette, when I heard his group Special Edition play in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance took its time to establish its space, as atmospheric, gradual developments slowly condensed towards percussive climaxes.

Reflective Thoughts on Music and Life

Talking to DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He explained that he enjoyed performing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and allow them to envelop me,” but also mentioned his aim to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always unrestricted and therefore healthy for the brain. He complained about the “safe confines” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you’re open to a full range of possibilities. People are capable of highly inventive but only seem to tap into their potential during crises. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, ceased harming the planet and put things back into it, we would have a healthier environment and society.”

Undoubtedly DeJohnette viewed his art as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that purification, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists have to draw on that.”