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

The interview with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. It was the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette had come to London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my initial question as a “drummer” seemed logical, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, an instance of pure enchantment captivated the audience as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of recurring tones 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 explained, “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 each part of his drum kit he considered to be a musical being “in its own right.” He designed and tuned his cymbals to his own specification. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he added. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the traditional rules of percussion. He was additionally a keyboardist of considerable merit – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship was consistently evident 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 exhibited a life-force 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 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 anchored the track firmly and gave Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance with complex percussive interjections – keeping a continual discussion with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established 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 sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing a wind instrument, and his rustic tune creations 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 issued 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 highly regarded work 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 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. Hearing that work around the time of its release, I was reminded of an earlier encounter with DeJohnette, when I heard his group Special Edition perform in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to establish its space, as ambient, slow-burn forms gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Reflective Thoughts on Music and Life

Talking to DeJohnette much later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He explained that he enjoyed performing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and let them saturate me,” but also spoke of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always unrestricted and therefore beneficial for the mind. He complained about the “predictable limits” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you embrace a complete spectrum of options. Individuals have the ability for very creative yet often only access 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.”

Undoubtedly DeJohnette viewed his art as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that cleansing, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists must tap into that source.”