🔗 Share this article

The interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. It was the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette was visiting London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” seemed logical, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being categorized and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, an instance of pure enchantment captivated the audience as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a labyrinthian drum solo as harmonically searching as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very nature of our existence. We don’t anticipate life unfolding without transformation and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?”

He further explained that every component of his percussion setup he considered to be a musical being “in its own right.” He designed and tuned his cymbals to his own specification. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “your approach becomes melodic on the kit,” he added. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the conventions of drum technique. He was also a pianist of considerable merit – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship seemed to be on display continuously, until his passing at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Musical Expression

Many drummers adjust their equipment to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing radiated a vitality that was entirely his own. To hear him play on “What I Say” from Miles Davis’s album Live-Evil is to marvel at 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 become the trumpeter’s drummer of choice in a collision of brilliant artists. His drums anchored the track firmly and gave Davis, and subsequently saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to explore, while DeJohnette packed his playing with rattling rhythmic asides – keeping a continual discussion with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a voice intimately connected with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he stayed fiercely autonomous. The pieces DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He included his own playing melodica, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted and, after leaving Davis, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he issued Untitled, a hectic quintet album, 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, emerged as a pivotal point for both musicians, and a much-loved classic too. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also doubling on keyboards and synthesisers, subsuming their own identities inside richly arranged compositions of natural themes. 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 mirroring the elemental force expressed through the music. Hearing that work around the time of its release, I was reminded of an previous experience with DeJohnette, when I heard his group Special Edition play in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to establish its space, as ambient, slow-burn forms gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Reflective Thoughts on Music and Life

Conversing with DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries made more sense. He told me how he enjoyed performing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and let them saturate 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 recurring motifs. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you embrace a complete spectrum of options. Individuals have the ability for highly inventive yet often only access their potential when there is a major earthquake. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, stopped abusing the Earth and put things back into it, we would have a healthier environment and society.”

Undoubtedly DeJohnette viewed his art as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that purification, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists have to draw on that.”