Jack DeJohnette: Beyond Just a Jazz Drummer – A Superhuman Force in Musical Arts

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. Labeling him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being categorized and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, a moment of transcendent magic captivated the audience as Jarrett held a long sequence of recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a labyrinthian drum solo as melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Truly a multifaceted artist.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette told me, “is linked to the very essence of being. 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 each part of his drum kit he considered to be a musical being “with its own identity.” He crafted and adjusted his cymbals to his own specification. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “your approach becomes melodic on the kit,” he noted. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the conventions of drum technique. He was additionally a keyboardist of significant talent – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship seemed to be on display all of the time, before his death at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Artistic Performance

Many drummers tune their kit to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing exhibited a life-force that was uniquely personal. To hear him play 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 meeting of mighty musical minds. His drums rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and allowed Davis, and later 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 first record, The DeJohnette Complex, immediately proposed 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 wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and embodied a fusion vibe while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He included his own playing a wind instrument, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted and, following his departure from Davis’s group, he joined 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 minimalist and stripped-down 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 much-loved classic too. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also adding electronic elements, merging their personal styles inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes of pastoral tones. A further critical record 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 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 perform in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance took its time to establish its space, as ambient, slow-burn forms gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Reflective Thoughts on Art and Existence

Talking to DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries made more sense. He told me how 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 create broader auditory landscapes, always open-ended 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 highly inventive yet often only access their potential during crises. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, ceased harming the planet and put things back into it, we would have a better world and community.”

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