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The interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. It was 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 opening inquiry as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, an instance of transcendent magic captivated the audience as Jarrett held a long sequence of repeated notes 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 idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette told me, “is linked to the very nature of our existence. We don’t anticipate life unfolding without changing and we never know what lies ahead – why should music be any different?”

He went on to clarify that each part of his drum kit he considered to be a musical being “with its own identity.” He crafted and adjusted his cymbals to his own specification. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “your approach becomes melodic on the kit,” he noted. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the traditional rules of percussion. He was also a pianist of significant talent – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship seemed to be on display all of the time, 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 marvel at seemingly boundless energy 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 emerged as Davis’s preferred percussionist in a collision of brilliant artists. His drums anchored the track firmly and allowed Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to experiment, while DeJohnette packed his playing with rattling rhythmic asides – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Artistic Independence

His own 1968 debut album, 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 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 featured himself playing melodica, and his folky melodic inventions soared.

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 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.

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 performed on their primary tools while also adding electronic elements, merging their personal styles 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 primal energy unleashed by 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 play in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance took its time to establish its space, as ambient, slow-burn forms slowly condensed towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale made more sense. He explained that he loved playing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and allow them to envelop me,” but also spoke of his desire to create broader auditory landscapes, always open-ended and therefore healthy for the brain. He complained about the “safe confines” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you’re open to 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 put things back into it, we would have a better world and community.”

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 have to draw on that.”