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The interview with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. It was the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette was visiting London for a series of concerts with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, an instance of transcendent magic captivated the audience as Jarrett held a long sequence of recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette propelled the sound with a labyrinthian drum solo as melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Truly a multifaceted artist.

“The idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette told me, “is linked to 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 every component of his percussion setup he considered to be a musical being “in its own right.” He designed and tuned his cymbals according to his personal standards. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he added. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the traditional rules of percussion. He was additionally a keyboardist of considerable merit – who released a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship was consistently evident continuously, until his passing at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Musical Expression

Many drummers adjust their equipment to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing exhibited a life-force 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 sustained a powerful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who also played 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 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 rattling rhythmic asides – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Creative Autonomy

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 harmonically ornate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He included his own playing a wind instrument, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex revealed that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex 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, became a landmark moment for both musicians, and a highly regarded work 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 pastoral tones. Another essential album 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 mirroring the primal energy unleashed by the music. Hearing that work around the time of its release, I was reminded of an previous experience with DeJohnette, when I heard his group Special Edition play 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.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale made more sense. He told me how he loved playing those rhythmic patterns 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 “safe confines” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you’re open to a complete spectrum of options. Individuals have the ability for highly inventive but only seem to tap into their potential during crises. 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 better world and community.”

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 have to draw on that.”