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My conversation with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. It was the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette was visiting London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my initial question as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being categorized and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, an instance of pure enchantment captivated the audience 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 told me, “is tied up in the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without changing and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?”

He further explained that each part of his drum kit he considered to be a musical being “in its own right.” He crafted and adjusted his cymbals according to his personal standards. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he noted. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the conventions of drum technique. He was also a pianist of considerable merit – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship was consistently evident continuously, until his passing at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Artistic Performance

Many drummers tune their kit to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing radiated a vitality that was entirely his own. Listening to his performance 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 gave Davis, and subsequently saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance with complex percussive interjections – keeping a continual discussion with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Artistic Independence

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 remained doggedly independent. The pieces DeJohnette created for his album were harmonically ornate and embodied a fusion vibe while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing melodica, and his folky melodic inventions 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 played piano, drums and organ, and duetted on some tracks with guitarist John Abercrombie, an album that was sparse and bare-bones 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 performed on their primary tools while also doubling on keyboards and synthesisers, merging their personal styles inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes 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 reflecting the primal energy expressed through the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, I was reminded of an previous experience with DeJohnette, when I listened to his band Special Edition play in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance took its time to establish its space, as atmospheric, gradual developments gradually telescoped towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Talking to DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale made more sense. He told me how he loved playing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and allow them to envelop me,” but also spoke of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always open-ended and therefore beneficial for the mind. He cited the “predictable limits” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you embrace a full range of possibilities. People are capable of very creative but only seem to tap into 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 healthier environment and society.”

Undoubtedly DeJohnette heard his music 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.”