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My conversation with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. It was the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette was visiting London for a series of concerts with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” seemed logical, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, an instance of transcendent magic 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 melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very essence of being. We don’t anticipate life unfolding without transformation and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?”

He went on to clarify that every component of his percussion setup he considered to be a musical being “in its own right.” 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 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, until his passing at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Artistic Performance

Numerous percussionists adjust their equipment to a bespoke design, 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 additionally performed on Davis’s epoch-defining 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 – keeping a continual discussion with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, immediately proposed that his was a style intimately connected with a jazz scene rapidly diversifying 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 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 energetic five-piece record, 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 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 adding electronic elements, merging their personal styles inside richly arranged compositions 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 expressed through the music. Hearing that work 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 establish its space, as ambient, slow-burn forms gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He explained that he enjoyed performing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and allow them to envelop me,” but also spoke of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always unrestricted 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 embrace a complete spectrum of options. Individuals have the ability for 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 viewed his art as reflecting those utopian goals. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that purification, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists must tap into that source.”