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The interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. It was the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette was visiting London for a series of concerts with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” seemed logical, 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 observing the Standards Trio, an instance of transcendent magic captivated the audience as Jarrett held a long sequence of recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette propelled the sound with a labyrinthian drum solo as melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette told me, “is linked to the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without changing 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 “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 noted. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the traditional rules of percussion. He was additionally a keyboardist of considerable merit – who released 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

Numerous percussionists tune their kit to a custom setup, but DeJohnette’s playing radiated a vitality that was uniquely personal. Listening to his performance 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 epoch-defining Bitches Brew, had by 1970 become the trumpeter’s drummer of choice in a meeting of mighty musical minds. His drums rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and gave Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to explore, 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 first record, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a style deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he remained doggedly independent. The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He included his own playing melodica, 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 released Untitled, a hectic quintet album, but also Pictures in which he performed on multiple instruments, and duetted on some tracks with guitarist John Abercrombie, an album that was sparse and bare-bones in contrast to Untitled.

Landmark Collaborations and Key Albums

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, merging their personal styles inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes 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 mirroring the elemental force unleashed by 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 percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He told me how he enjoyed performing 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 beneficial for the mind. He cited the “predictable limits” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you embrace a complete spectrum of options. 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, stopped abusing the Earth and restored balance, we would have a better world and community.”

No question that DeJohnette heard his music as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that cleansing, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists have to draw on that.”