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The interview with Jack DeJohnette got off to a rocky start. This occurred during the summer of 2000, when DeJohnette had come to 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 didn’t appreciate being categorized and responded sharply: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, a moment of transcendent magic captivated the audience 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 idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without changing and we never know what lies ahead – why should music be any different?”

He further explained that every component of his percussion setup he considered to be 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 “you think harmonically on the kit,” he added. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head were never limited by the traditional rules of percussion. 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 continuously, before his death at the age of 83.

An Unmatched Energy in Artistic Performance

Many drummers tune their kit to a bespoke design, 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 maintained an impactful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who additionally performed on Davis’s epoch-defining Bitches Brew, had by 1970 become the trumpeter’s drummer of choice in a collision of brilliant artists. His drums anchored the track firmly and gave Davis, and subsequently 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 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, immediately proposed that his was a voice intimately connected 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 embodied a fusion vibe while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation. He included his own playing melodica, and his rustic tune creations soared.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was truly multifaceted and, after leaving Davis, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he released 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, 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, subsuming their own identities inside richly arranged compositions 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 elemental force expressed through the music. Hearing that work 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 gradually telescoped towards percussive climaxes.

Philosophical Insights on Music and Life

Talking to DeJohnette much later, these ideas of pushing structural boundaries made more sense. He explained that he loved playing those funk figurations with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and allow them to envelop me,” but also mentioned his aim 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 embrace a full range of possibilities. 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, ceased harming the planet and put things back into it, we would have a better world and community.”

Undoubtedly DeJohnette viewed his art as reflecting those utopian goals. “Creativity mirrors the soul of that purification, which is passed to us as energy – and all artists must tap into that source.”