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My conversation 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. Labeling 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, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, an instance of transcendent magic thrilled me as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a labyrinthian drum solo as harmonically searching as anything Jarrett had played. Truly a multifaceted artist.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very essence of being. We don’t expect our life to evolve without transformation 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 viewed as 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 “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 also a pianist of considerable merit – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship was consistently evident all of the time, until his passing at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Artistic Performance

Many drummers adjust their equipment to a custom setup, but DeJohnette’s playing exhibited a life-force that was uniquely personal. To hear him play 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 rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and gave Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance 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 voice deeply linked with a jazz scene rapidly diversifying around him, while he stayed fiercely autonomous. The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were melodically intricate and embodied a fusion vibe 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 joined ECM Records. In 1976 he issued 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, became a landmark moment for both musicians, and a highly regarded work too. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also adding electronic elements, subsuming their own identities inside richly arranged compositions 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 reflecting the primal energy unleashed by the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, I was reminded of 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 slowly condensed towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He told me how he loved playing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and allow them to envelop me,” but also mentioned his aim 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 repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you’re open to a full range of possibilities. People are capable of highly inventive but only seem to tap into their potential during crises. But if people were more conscious 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 modelling those idealist aspirations. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that cleansing, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists have to draw on that.”