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The interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. It was the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette was visiting London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” seemed logical, but DeJohnette resisted being categorized and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, a moment of transcendent magic captivated the audience as Jarrett held a long sequence of repeated notes high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a labyrinthian drum solo as melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve 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 considered to be a musical being “in its own right.” He designed and tuned his cymbals to his own specification. 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 traditional rules of percussion. He was additionally a keyboardist of significant talent – who issued 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.

A Unique Life-Force in Artistic Performance

Numerous percussionists adjust their equipment to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing exhibited a life-force that was entirely his own. 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 maintained an impactful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who additionally performed 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 filled his performance with rattling rhythmic asides – 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 compositions DeJohnette created 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 soared.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex and, after leaving Davis, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he released Untitled, a hectic quintet album, but also Pictures in which he performed on multiple instruments, and collaborated on several pieces 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, 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, 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 elemental force unleashed by the music. Hearing that work around the time of its release, it recalled 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 rhythmic blows.

Philosophical Insights on Music and Life

Conversing with DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries became clearer. He explained that he loved playing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and let them saturate me,” but also spoke of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always unrestricted and therefore beneficial for the mind. He complained about the “predictable limits” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you embrace a complete spectrum of options. Individuals have the ability for very creative 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.”

No question that DeJohnette viewed his art as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that purification, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists must tap into that source.”