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My conversation with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. This occurred during the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette had come to London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being pigeonholed and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, an instance of transcendent magic thrilled me 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. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette told me, “is linked to the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without transformation and we never know what lies ahead – 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 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 sounds inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the conventions of drum technique. He was additionally a keyboardist of significant talent – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship was consistently evident all of the time, before his death at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Musical Expression

Numerous percussionists tune their kit to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing radiated a vitality that was entirely his own. To hear him play on “What I Say” from Miles Davis’s album Live-Evil is to marvel at apparently superhuman drive as he maintained an impactful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who additionally performed on Davis’s groundbreaking 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, ample room to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance with complex percussive interjections – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 debut album, 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 pieces 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, 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 collaborated on several pieces with guitarist John Abercrombie, an album that was minimalist and stripped-down in contrast to Untitled.

Iconic Partnerships and Essential Recordings

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 performed on their primary tools 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 dealt up large-scale structures with pieces such as “Free Above Sea” and “Priestesses of the Mist,” their titles reflecting the primal energy unleashed by the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, it recalled an earlier encounter with DeJohnette, when I listened to his band Special Edition perform in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to stake out its terrain, as ambient, slow-burn forms slowly condensed towards percussive climaxes.

Reflective Thoughts on Art and Existence

Talking to DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries made more sense. He explained that he enjoyed performing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and allow them to envelop me,” but also spoke of his desire to create broader auditory landscapes, always unrestricted and therefore healthy for the brain. He complained about the “safe confines” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you embrace a complete spectrum of options. Individuals have the ability for highly inventive yet often only access their potential during crises. But if people were more conscious 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 modelling those idealist aspirations. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that cleansing, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists have to draw on that.”