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My conversation 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” seemed logical, but DeJohnette resisted being pigeonholed and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, a moment of transcendent magic captivated the audience as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of repeated notes high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a complex percussion display as melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to 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 further explained that every component of his percussion setup he considered to be a musical being “in its own right.” He designed and tuned his cymbals to his own specification. Mix the sound of cymbals with the drums and then “your approach becomes melodic on the kit,” he noted. The auditory ideas 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 each aspect of his musicianship seemed to be on display all of the time, until his passing at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Musical Expression

Many drummers tune their kit to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing exhibited a life-force that was uniquely personal. Listening to his performance 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 also played on Davis’s groundbreaking Bitches Brew, had by 1970 become the trumpeter’s drummer of choice in a collision of brilliant artists. His drums rooted What I Say deep in the Earth and allowed Davis, and subsequently saxophonist Wayne Shorter, ample room to explore, while DeJohnette filled his performance with rattling rhythmic asides – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Artistic Independence

His own 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, quickly established that his was a voice deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he stayed fiercely autonomous. The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were melodically intricate and asserted jazz/rock energy 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, following his departure from Davis’s group, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he issued Untitled, a hectic quintet album, 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 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 much-loved classic too. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also adding electronic elements, merging their personal styles inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes of pastoral tones. Another essential album 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 primal energy unleashed by the music. Listening to that album 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 took its time to stake out its terrain, as atmospheric, gradual developments slowly condensed towards rhythmic blows.

Reflective Thoughts on Art and Existence

Talking to DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries became clearer. He told me how he loved playing those rhythmic patterns 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 open-ended and therefore healthy for the brain. He complained about the “safe confines” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you’re open to a complete spectrum of options. People are capable of 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.”

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.”