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The interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t begin smoothly. This occurred during the summer of 2000, as DeJohnette was visiting London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my initial question as a “drummer” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being categorized and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” Shortly after, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, a moment 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. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette told me, “is tied up in the very nature of our existence. We don’t anticipate life unfolding without transformation and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?”

He went on to clarify that each part of his drum kit he viewed as 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 added. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the traditional rules of percussion. 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, before his death at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Artistic Performance

Numerous percussionists tune their kit to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing radiated a vitality that was uniquely personal. 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 gave Davis, and later saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to explore, while DeJohnette packed his playing with complex percussive interjections – maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the other musicians.

Pioneering Beginnings and Creative Autonomy

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 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 featured himself playing melodica, and his folky melodic inventions took flight.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted and, after leaving Davis, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he issued 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.

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, merging their personal styles inside richly arranged compositions 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 reflecting the elemental force expressed through the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, I was reminded of an earlier encounter with DeJohnette, when I heard his group Special Edition perform in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to establish its space, as atmospheric, gradual developments gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale made more sense. He told me how he enjoyed performing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and let them saturate me,” but also spoke of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always open-ended and therefore beneficial for the mind. He cited the “predictable limits” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you’re open to a full range of possibilities. Individuals have the ability for highly inventive 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 better world and community.”

Undoubtedly DeJohnette heard his music as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that cleansing, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists have to draw on that.”