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The interview with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. It was the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette had come to London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” felt appropriate, 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 pure enchantment captivated the audience as Jarrett held a long sequence of recurring tones high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a complex percussion display as harmonically searching as anything Jarrett had played. Truly a multifaceted artist.

“The idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette explained, “is tied up in the very nature of our existence. We don’t anticipate life unfolding without changing 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 viewed as a musical being “in its own right.” He crafted and adjusted his cymbals according to his personal standards. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he noted. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the conventions of drum technique. He was also a pianist of significant talent – who issued a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship seemed to be on display continuously, until his passing at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Artistic Performance

Numerous percussionists tune their kit to a custom setup, but DeJohnette’s playing radiated a vitality that was entirely his own. Listening to his performance on “What I Say” from Miles Davis’s album Live-Evil is to marvel at apparently superhuman drive as he sustained a powerful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who also played on Davis’s groundbreaking 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 allowed Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance with complex percussive interjections – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Artistic Independence

His own 1968 first record, The DeJohnette Complex, immediately proposed that his was a voice 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 melodica, and his folky melodic inventions soared.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated 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 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.

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 doubling on keyboards and synthesisers, merging their personal styles inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes of natural themes. 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 elemental force expressed through the music. Hearing that work around the time of its release, I was reminded of an previous experience with DeJohnette, when I listened to his band 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 gradually telescoped towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Music and Life

Talking to DeJohnette much later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He told me how he loved playing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and allow them to envelop me,” but also spoke of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always open-ended and therefore healthy for the brain. He complained about the “predictable limits” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “However, through spontaneous play,” he said, “you’re open to a full range of possibilities. Individuals have the ability for very creative but only seem to tap into their potential during crises. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, stopped abusing the Earth 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 cleansing, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists have to draw on that.”