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The interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. It was 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 initial question as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being pigeonholed and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, a moment of pure enchantment thrilled me as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of repeated notes 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 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 lies ahead – why should music be any different?”

He went on to clarify that every component of his percussion setup he viewed as a musical being “with its own identity.” He designed and tuned 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 additionally a keyboardist of significant talent – who issued a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship seemed to be on display all of the time, before his death at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Artistic Performance

Many drummers 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 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, all the space they needed to explore, while DeJohnette packed his playing with rattling rhythmic asides – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 debut album, 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 stayed fiercely autonomous. The pieces DeJohnette wrote for his album were melodically intricate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He included his own playing melodica, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted 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 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, 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 pastoral tones. Another essential album 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 primal energy unleashed by the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, I was reminded of an previous experience with DeJohnette, when I heard his group Special Edition play in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to establish its space, as ambient, slow-burn forms gradually telescoped towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Music and Life

Talking to DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries became clearer. He explained that he loved playing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and let them saturate me,” but also mentioned his aim to create broader auditory landscapes, always unrestricted and therefore beneficial for the mind. He cited the “safe confines” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you’re open to 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 put things back into it, we would have a better world and community.”

No question that DeJohnette viewed his art as reflecting those utopian goals. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that purification, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists have to draw on that.”