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My conversation with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. This occurred during the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette was visiting London for a series of concerts with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being categorized and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, an instance 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 harmonically searching as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette explained, “is tied up in the very essence of being. We don’t expect our life to evolve without transformation 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 “with its own identity.” He crafted and adjusted his cymbals to his own specification. Combine the tones of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he noted. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the traditional rules of percussion. He was also a pianist of significant talent – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship was consistently evident 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 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 maintained an impactful 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 rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and allowed Davis, and subsequently saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to explore, while DeJohnette filled his performance with rattling rhythmic asides – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 first record, 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 remained doggedly independent. The pieces DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and embodied a fusion vibe while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing a wind instrument, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex and, after leaving Davis, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he released Untitled, a hectic quintet album, 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.

Landmark Collaborations 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 highly regarded work too. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also doubling on keyboards and synthesisers, subsuming their own identities inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes 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 reflecting the elemental force expressed through the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, it recalled an previous experience 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 slowly condensed towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Music and Life

Conversing with DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale made more sense. 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 complete spectrum of options. 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 restored balance, we would have a better world and community.”

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