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My conversation with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. 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 opening inquiry as a “drummer” seemed logical, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being categorized and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, a moment of pure enchantment captivated the audience as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of repeated notes high on the piano and DeJohnette propelled the sound with a complex percussion display 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 each part of his drum kit he viewed as a musical being “in its own right.” He crafted and adjusted his cymbals according to his personal standards. Combine the tones of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he added. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the traditional rules of percussion. He was additionally a keyboardist of considerable merit – who issued a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship seemed to be on display continuously, before his death at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Musical Expression

Numerous percussionists tune their kit to a custom setup, but DeJohnette’s playing exhibited a life-force 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 groundbreaking Bitches Brew, had by 1970 become the trumpeter’s drummer of choice in a meeting of mighty musical minds. His drums anchored the track firmly and allowed Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to explore, while DeJohnette packed his playing with complex percussive interjections – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 first record, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a style deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he stayed fiercely autonomous. The pieces DeJohnette created for his album were melodically intricate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing melodica, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex revealed that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted and, following his departure from Davis’s group, 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 collaborated on several pieces with guitarist John Abercrombie, an album that was sparse and bare-bones in contrast to Untitled.

Iconic Partnerships 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, merging their personal styles inside richly arranged compositions of natural themes. A further critical record 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 primal energy expressed through the music. Hearing that work around the time of its release, it recalled an earlier encounter with DeJohnette, when I listened to his band Special Edition play in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance took its time to stake out its terrain, as ambient, slow-burn forms slowly condensed towards rhythmic blows.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette much 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 immerse in rhythms and allow them to envelop me,” but also spoke of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always open-ended and therefore healthy for the brain. He cited 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 conscious of our place within nature, stopped abusing the Earth and restored balance, we would have a better world and community.”

No question that DeJohnette heard his music as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that purification, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists must tap into that source.”