🔗 Share this article

The interview with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. This occurred during the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette had come to London for a series of concerts with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my initial question as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, an instance of pure enchantment thrilled me as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette propelled the sound with a labyrinthian drum solo as harmonically searching as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very essence of being. We don’t anticipate life unfolding without changing and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?”

He went on to clarify that every component of his percussion setup he viewed as a musical being “with its own identity.” He designed and tuned his cymbals according to his personal standards. Combine the tones of cymbals with the drums and then “your approach becomes melodic on the kit,” he added. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the conventions of drum technique. 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, before his death at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Musical Expression

Many drummers adjust their equipment to a custom setup, but DeJohnette’s playing radiated a vitality that was uniquely personal. Listening to his performance on “What I Say” from Miles Davis’s album Live-Evil is to marvel at apparently superhuman drive as he sustained a powerful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who additionally performed on Davis’s groundbreaking Bitches Brew, had by 1970 emerged as Davis’s preferred percussionist in a collision of brilliant artists. His drums rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and gave Davis, and subsequently saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to experiment, while DeJohnette packed his playing with rattling rhythmic asides – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, immediately proposed that his was a voice intimately connected with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he stayed fiercely autonomous. The compositions DeJohnette created for his album were melodically intricate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing a wind instrument, and his folky melodic inventions soared.

The DeJohnette Complex revealed that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex and, after leaving Davis, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he released 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 sparse and bare-bones in contrast to Untitled.

Landmark Collaborations and Essential Recordings

His 1981 ECM album with saxophonist John Surman, The Amazing Adventures of Simon Simon, became a landmark moment for both musicians, and a highly regarded work too. Surman and DeJohnette performed on their primary tools while also adding electronic elements, subsuming their own identities inside richly arranged compositions of pastoral tones. Another essential album was Oneness, recorded in 1997, which dealt up large-scale structures with pieces such as “Free Above Sea” and “Priestesses of the Mist,” their titles mirroring the primal energy 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 atmospheric, gradual developments gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Reflective Thoughts on Music and Life

Conversing with DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He told me how he loved playing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and allow them to envelop me,” but also spoke of his desire to create broader auditory landscapes, always unrestricted and therefore healthy for the brain. He complained about the “predictable limits” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you’re open to a full range of possibilities. People are capable of very creative yet often only access their potential during crises. 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.”

No question that DeJohnette viewed his art as reflecting those utopian goals. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that cleansing, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists must tap into that source.”