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The interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. This occurred during the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette had come to London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my initial question as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, a moment of transcendent magic thrilled me as Jarrett held a long sequence of recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a complex percussion display 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 every component of his percussion setup he viewed as 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 “you think harmonically on the kit,” he noted. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the traditional rules of percussion. 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

Numerous percussionists adjust their equipment to a custom setup, 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 groundbreaking Bitches Brew, had by 1970 become the trumpeter’s drummer of choice in a meeting of mighty musical minds. His drums anchored the track firmly and gave Davis, and subsequently 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 Artistic Independence

His own 1968 first record, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a style intimately connected with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he remained doggedly independent. The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were melodically intricate and embodied a fusion vibe while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He included his own playing melodica, and his rustic tune creations took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted and, following his departure from Davis’s group, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he issued 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 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, 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 natural themes. 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 expressed through the music. Hearing that work around the time of its release, it recalled an earlier encounter with DeJohnette, when I heard his group Special Edition play in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to establish its space, as ambient, slow-burn forms slowly condensed towards percussive climaxes.

Reflective Thoughts on Music and Life

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries became clearer. He told me how 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 generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, 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. People are capable of 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, 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. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that purification, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists must tap into that source.”