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The interview 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” felt appropriate, but DeJohnette resisted being categorized and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, attending a performance at the Royal Festival Hall observing the Standards Trio, a moment of pure enchantment thrilled me as Jarrett sustained a long sequence of repeated notes high on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards with a labyrinthian drum solo as melodically exploratory as anything Jarrett had played. Complete musician indeed.

“The concept of spontaneous creation,” DeJohnette explained, “is linked to the very essence of being. We don’t expect our life to evolve without changing and we never know what’s round the corner – 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 crafted and adjusted his cymbals to his own specification. Combine the tones of cymbals with the drums and then “you think harmonically on the kit,” he noted. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the traditional rules of percussion. He was also a pianist of considerable merit – who released 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 Artistic Performance

Numerous percussionists tune their kit 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 sustained a powerful funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who also played on Davis’s epoch-defining Bitches Brew, had by 1970 become the trumpeter’s drummer of choice in a meeting of mighty musical minds. 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 packed his playing 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 voice deeply linked with a jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while he stayed fiercely autonomous. The pieces DeJohnette created for his album were melodically intricate and asserted jazz/rock energy while also sometimes drifting into free-form improvisation. He included his own playing a wind instrument, and his rustic tune creations soared.

The DeJohnette Complex revealed that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex 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.

Landmark Collaborations 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 adding electronic elements, merging their personal styles inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes of natural themes. 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 expressed through the music. Listening to that album around the time of its release, it recalled an previous experience with DeJohnette, when I heard his group 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.

Philosophical Insights on Art and Existence

Conversing with DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form and scale became clearer. He explained that he enjoyed performing those rhythmic patterns with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and let them saturate me,” but also mentioned his aim to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always open-ended and therefore healthy for the brain. He cited the “safe confines” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, though,” he said, “you embrace a complete spectrum of options. People are capable of 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, ceased harming the planet and put things back into it, we would have a healthier environment and society.”

No question that DeJohnette heard his music as modelling those idealist aspirations. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that cleansing, which is transmitted as vitality – and all artists must tap into that source.”