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The interview with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. This occurred during the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette had come to London for a series of concerts with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my initial question as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being categorized 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 recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a labyrinthian drum solo as melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to 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 further explained that every component of his percussion setup he viewed as a musical being “in its own right.” He designed and tuned his cymbals to his own specification. Combine the tones 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 conventions of drum technique. He was additionally a keyboardist of significant talent – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship was consistently evident continuously, before his death at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Musical Expression

Many drummers adjust their equipment 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 seemingly boundless energy as he sustained a powerful 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 collision of brilliant artists. His drums anchored the track firmly and gave Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to explore, while DeJohnette filled his performance with rattling rhythmic asides – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Artistic Independence

His own 1968 first record, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a style intimately connected with a jazz scene rapidly diversifying around him, while he remained doggedly independent. The compositions DeJohnette created for his album were harmonically ornate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing melodica, and his rustic tune creations soared.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex and, after leaving Davis, he joined ECM Records. In 1976 he released Untitled, a energetic five-piece record, 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 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 much-loved classic too. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also adding electronic elements, 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 mirroring the elemental force expressed through the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, I was reminded of an earlier encounter 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 atmospheric, gradual developments slowly condensed towards rhythmic blows.

Philosophical Insights on Music and Life

Talking to DeJohnette much later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He told me how he enjoyed performing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and let them saturate me,” but also spoke of his desire to create broader auditory landscapes, always unrestricted and therefore healthy for the brain. He cited the “predictable limits” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you embrace a complete spectrum of options. People are capable of highly inventive but only seem to tap into their potential when there is a major earthquake. 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 healthier environment and society.”

No question that DeJohnette heard his music as reflecting those utopian goals. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that purification, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists have to draw on that.”