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The interview with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. This occurred during the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette had come to London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed 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 thrilled me as Jarrett held a long sequence of repeated notes high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards 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 nature of our existence. 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 every component of his percussion setup 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 noted. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the traditional rules of percussion. He was also a pianist of considerable merit – who released 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.

A Unique Life-Force in Musical Expression

Numerous percussionists 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 be amazed by seemingly boundless energy as he sustained a powerful 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 collision of brilliant artists. His drums rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and gave Davis, and subsequently saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance with complex percussive interjections – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Artistic Independence

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 melodically intricate and embodied a fusion vibe while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He included his own playing a wind instrument, and his rustic tune creations soared.

The DeJohnette Complex revealed that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted and, after leaving Davis, he joined 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 played their usual instruments while also adding electronic elements, merging their personal styles inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes of pastoral tones. Another essential album 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 elemental force expressed through the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, I was reminded of an previous experience with DeJohnette, when I listened to his band Special Edition perform in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to stake out its terrain, as ambient, slow-burn forms gradually telescoped towards percussive climaxes.

Reflective Thoughts on Art and Existence

Talking to DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale made more sense. He told me how he enjoyed performing those rhythmic patterns 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 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 full range of possibilities. Individuals have the ability for highly inventive 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 healthier environment and society.”

No question that DeJohnette viewed his art as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that purification, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists must tap into that source.”