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My conversation 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 initial question as a “drummer” seemed logical, 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 pure enchantment captivated the audience as Jarrett held a long sequence of repeated notes 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 idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette told me, “is tied up in 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 went on to clarify that every component of his percussion setup he viewed as 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 noted. The auditory ideas inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the conventions of drum technique. He was also a pianist 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, until his passing at the age of 83.

A Unique Life-Force in Artistic Performance

Many drummers adjust their equipment to a custom setup, 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 apparently superhuman drive as he maintained an impactful 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 subsequently saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to experiment, while DeJohnette filled his performance with rattling rhythmic asides – keeping a continual discussion with the other musicians.

Early Innovations and Creative Autonomy

His own 1968 first record, The DeJohnette Complex, immediately proposed that his was a style deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he remained doggedly independent. The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He featured himself playing a wind instrument, and his folky melodic inventions 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 hectic quintet album, but also Pictures in which he played piano, drums and organ, 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, emerged as a pivotal point for both musicians, and a much-loved classic too. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also doubling on keyboards and synthesisers, merging their personal styles inside richly arranged compositions 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 mirroring the elemental force unleashed by the music. Hearing that work around the time of its release, it recalled an previous experience with DeJohnette, when I heard his group Special Edition perform in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance took its time to establish its space, as atmospheric, gradual developments gradually telescoped towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Music and Life

Conversing with DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries became clearer. He explained that he enjoyed performing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could immerse in rhythms and let them saturate me,” but also mentioned his aim to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always open-ended and therefore beneficial for the mind. He complained about the “safe confines” 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 yet often only access their potential when there is a major earthquake. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, ceased harming the planet and put things back into it, 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 purification, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists have to draw on that.”