The Legendary Jack DeJohnette: Beyond Just a Jazz Percussionist – A Superhuman Force in Musical Arts

My conversation with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. It was the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette was visiting London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my initial question as a “drummer” seemed logical, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed 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 transcendent magic thrilled me as Jarrett held 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. 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 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 viewed as a musical being “in its own right.” He designed and tuned his cymbals according to his personal standards. Combine the tones of cymbals with the drums and then “your approach becomes melodic on the kit,” he added. 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 all of the time, until his passing at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Musical Expression

Numerous percussionists adjust their equipment to a bespoke design, 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 apparently superhuman drive 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 emerged as Davis’s preferred percussionist in a collision of brilliant artists. His drums rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and gave Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to experiment, while DeJohnette packed his playing with complex percussive interjections – keeping a continual discussion with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 first record, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a voice deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he stayed fiercely autonomous. The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were melodically intricate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing a wind instrument, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted and, following his departure from Davis’s group, 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.

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 much-loved classic too. Surman and DeJohnette performed on their primary tools while also doubling on keyboards and synthesisers, subsuming their own identities inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes 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 reflecting the elemental force unleashed by 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 perform in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance took its time to stake out its terrain, as ambient, slow-burn forms gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries became clearer. He told me how he loved playing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and let them saturate me,” but also mentioned his aim to create broader auditory landscapes, always open-ended and therefore beneficial for the mind. He cited the “predictable limits” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you’re open to a complete spectrum of options. People are capable of highly inventive but only seem to tap into their potential when there is a major earthquake. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, stopped abusing the Earth and restored balance, we would have a healthier environment and society.”

Undoubtedly DeJohnette viewed his art as reflecting those utopian goals. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that cleansing, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists must tap into that source.”