Jack DeJohnette: Beyond Just a Jazz Percussionist – A Superhuman Force in Musical Arts

The interview with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. It was the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette was visiting London to perform with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Labeling him in my opening inquiry as a “drummer” seemed logical, 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, a moment of transcendent magic thrilled me as Jarrett sustained 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 concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette explained, “is tied up in the very essence of being. We don’t anticipate life unfolding without transformation 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 viewed as a musical being “with its own identity.” 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 sounds inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the traditional rules of percussion. He was additionally a keyboardist of considerable merit – who issued a solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and each aspect of his musicianship was consistently evident continuously, until his passing at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Artistic Performance

Numerous percussionists tune their kit to a custom setup, 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 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 gave Davis, and subsequently saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to explore, while DeJohnette filled his performance 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 voice deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he remained doggedly independent. The pieces DeJohnette created for his album were melodically intricate and embodied a fusion vibe while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He included his own playing a wind instrument, and his folky melodic inventions 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 released Untitled, a energetic five-piece record, but also Pictures in which he played piano, drums and organ, and duetted on some tracks 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, subsuming their own identities inside richly arranged compositions of pastoral tones. A further critical record was Oneness, recorded in 1997, which presented expansive forms with pieces such as “Free Above Sea” and “Priestesses of the Mist,” their titles mirroring the primal energy unleashed by the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, it recalled an earlier encounter with DeJohnette, when I listened to his band Special Edition perform in Leeds during the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to establish its space, as atmospheric, gradual developments slowly condensed towards rhythmic blows.

Reflective Thoughts on Art and Existence

Talking to DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries made more sense. He explained that he loved playing those funk figurations 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 unrestricted and therefore healthy for the brain. He complained about the “predictable limits” of pop music with its recurring motifs. “However, through spontaneous play,” 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 during crises. But if people were more conscious 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. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that purification, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists have to draw on that.”