Jack DeJohnette: More Than a Jazz Percussionist – A Superhuman Force in Musical Arts

The interview 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 initial question as a “drummer” seemed logical, 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 watching the Standards Trio, an instance of transcendent magic 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 melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Truly a multifaceted artist.

“The idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve 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 “with its own identity.” He designed and tuned his cymbals according to his personal standards. Combine the tones of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he added. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the conventions of drum technique. He was also a pianist of considerable merit – who issued a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship was consistently evident all of the time, before his death at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Musical Expression

Numerous percussionists tune their kit 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 marvel at seemingly boundless energy 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 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, all the space they needed to experiment, while DeJohnette packed his playing with complex percussive interjections – keeping a continual discussion with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Artistic Independence

His own 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a style deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he stayed fiercely autonomous. The pieces DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and embodied a fusion vibe while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He included his own playing a wind instrument, and his rustic tune creations soared.

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 energetic five-piece record, 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 Essential Recordings

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 natural themes. 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 elemental force expressed through the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, it recalled an previous experience 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 gradually telescoped towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries became clearer. He told me how he enjoyed performing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and let them saturate me,” but also spoke of his desire to create broader auditory landscapes, always open-ended and therefore beneficial for the mind. He cited the “safe confines” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you’re open to a full range of possibilities. People are capable of highly inventive yet often only access their potential when there is a major earthquake. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, ceased harming the planet and restored balance, we would have a better world and community.”

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 have to draw on that.”