Jack DeJohnette: More Than a Jazz Percussionist – A Unstoppable Power in Music

The interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. It was the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette had come to London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” seemed logical, but DeJohnette resisted being categorized and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, a moment of transcendent magic thrilled me as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of recurring tones 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 further explained that each part of his drum kit he viewed as a musical being “in its own right.” He crafted and adjusted his cymbals to his own specification. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he noted. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the traditional rules of percussion. He was additionally a keyboardist of significant talent – who issued a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship seemed to be on display continuously, until his passing at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Artistic Performance

Many drummers tune their kit to a custom setup, 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 be amazed by apparently superhuman drive as he sustained a powerful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who also played on Davis’s groundbreaking Bitches Brew, had by 1970 emerged as Davis’s preferred percussionist in a meeting of mighty musical minds. His drums anchored the track firmly and allowed Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to explore, while DeJohnette filled his performance with rattling rhythmic asides – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Artistic Independence

His own 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a style deeply linked with a jazz scene rapidly diversifying around him, while he remained doggedly independent. 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 a wind instrument, and his rustic tune creations soared.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated 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 released Untitled, a hectic quintet album, but also Pictures in which he played piano, drums and organ, 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, emerged as a pivotal point 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 richly arranged compositions of pastoral tones. 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 reflecting the elemental force expressed through 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 was in no hurry to stake out its terrain, as atmospheric, gradual developments gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Philosophical Insights on Music and Life

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries became clearer. He explained that he loved playing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and let them saturate me,” but also spoke of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always unrestricted and therefore healthy for the brain. He complained about the “predictable limits” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you’re open to a full range of possibilities. Individuals have the ability for very creative but only seem to tap into their potential when there is a major earthquake. But if people were more conscious of our place within nature, ceased harming the planet and restored balance, we would have a healthier environment and society.”

No question that DeJohnette viewed his art 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.”