🔗 Share this article

My conversation with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. This occurred during the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette had come to London for a series of concerts with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” seemed logical, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being pigeonholed and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, an instance of pure enchantment thrilled me as Jarrett held a long sequence of recurring tones 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 concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without transformation and we never know what lies ahead – why should music be any different?”

He further explained that every component of his percussion setup he considered to be 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 sounds inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained 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 was consistently evident all of the time, before his death at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Artistic Performance

Numerous percussionists adjust their equipment to a custom setup, but DeJohnette’s playing exhibited a life-force that was uniquely personal. Listening to his performance on “What I Say” from Miles Davis’s album Live-Evil is to be amazed by apparently superhuman drive as he sustained a powerful 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 collision of brilliant artists. His drums anchored the track firmly and allowed Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance 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 style deeply linked with a jazz scene rapidly diversifying around him, while he remained doggedly independent. The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and embodied a fusion vibe while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing melodica, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex revealed that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex and, following his departure from Davis’s group, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he issued Untitled, a energetic five-piece record, but also Pictures in which he played piano, drums and organ, and duetted on some tracks with guitarist John Abercrombie, an album that was minimalist and stripped-down in contrast to Untitled.

Iconic Partnerships 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 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. Listening to that album 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 was in no hurry to establish its space, as ambient, slow-burn forms slowly condensed towards rhythmic blows.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries made more sense. He told me how he loved playing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and let them saturate me,” but also spoke of his desire to create broader auditory landscapes, always unrestricted and therefore beneficial for the mind. He cited the “safe confines” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you’re open to a complete spectrum of options. People are capable of very creative but only seem to tap into their potential during crises. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, stopped abusing the Earth and restored balance, we would have a healthier environment and society.”

No question that DeJohnette viewed his art as reflecting those utopian goals. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that cleansing, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists have to draw on that.”