Jack DeJohnette was more than just a jazz drummer – his incredible range made him a superpower in music | jazz

MThe interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t start out well. It was the summer of 2000 and DeJohnette was in London to play with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring to him in my first question as a “drummer” seemed reasonable enough, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being pigeonholed and immediately replied: “I’m a complete musician.” A few days later, as I sat in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio, I was struck by a moment of transcendent magic as Jarrett held a long series of repeated notes high on the piano and DeJohnette played the music forward through a labyrinthine drum solo that looked as harmoniously as anything Jarrett had ever played. A complete musician indeed.

“The idea of ​​improvisation is tied to the nature of our being,” DeJohnette told me. “We don’t expect our lives to evolve without changing, and we never know what lies ahead – why should music be any different?” He further explained that each part of his drum kit he considers a musical being “in itself.” He designed and tuned his own cymbals to his own specifications. “Mix the sound of the cymbals with the drums and then ‘think harmoniously over the kit,'” he added. The sounds inside DeJohnette’s head could never be contained by the conventions of drum technique. He was also a pianist of great merit — he released a solo piano album called “Return” in 2016 — and every aspect of his music seemed to be on display at all times, until his death this week At the age of 83 years.

Many drummers tune their instruments to a custom design, but DeJohnette’s playing displayed a life force that was entirely his own. To hear him play “What I Say” from Miles Davis’ album Live-Evil, you’ll marvel at the seemingly superhuman drive as he maintained the poignant funk/rock beat for 20 minutes. DeJohnette, who also played on Davis’ era-defining hit Bitches Brew, by 1970 had become the trumpeter’s favorite drummer at a meeting of mighty musical minds. His drumming rooted “What I’m Saying” deep into the ground and allowed Davis, and then saxophonist Wayne Shorter, all the space they needed to explore, while DeJohnette packed his playing with rattling rhythmic aspects – all the while maintaining a constant discussion with the other musicians.

His 1968 debut album, The DeJohnette Complex, immediately demonstrated that his sound was intimately connected to the jazz scene exploding in a thousand directions around him, while remaining doggedly independent. The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and emphasized the energy of jazz/rock while sometimes leaning toward free improvisation. He made himself play melodica, and his melodic inventions rose to popularity.

Complex showed that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully complex, and after Davis left, he was signed to ECM Records. In 1976 he was released Untitled, a frenetic quintet album, but it also depicted him playing piano, drums and organ, and he duetted on some tracks with guitarist John Abercrombie, an album that was sparse and abstract in contrast to Untitled.

His 1981 ECM album with saxophonist John Surman, The Amazing Adventures of Simon Simon, became a landmark moment for both musicians, and a much-loved classic as well. Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also playing keyboards and synthesizers, inserting their own identities within lavishly orchestrated soundscapes of pastoral tunes. Another seminal album was Oneness, recorded in 1997, which dealt with large-scale structures with pieces such as Free Over the Sea and Pestesses of the Mist, their titles reflecting the fundamental force unleashed by the music. Listening to this album around the time of its release, I was reminded of an earlier encounter with DeJohnette, when I heard his own group playing in Leeds in the late 1980s. This performance was in no hurry to define its terrain, with slow-burning ambient forms gradually moving towards rhythmic beats.

After talking to DeJohnette all these years later, these ideas about the shape and size of stress testing make more sense. He told me how he loved playing these funk figures with Davis because “I could sit in the grooves and let them fill me up,” but he also talked about his desire to create musical soundscapes with wide angles, always open-ended and therefore healthy for the mind. He complained about the “safe limits” of pop music with its repetitive patterns. “With improvisation, you’re open to a whole range of possibilities,” he said. “People are able to be very creative but they only seem to tap into their potential when there’s a big earthquake or something like that. But if people were more aware of our place within nature, stopped abusing the land and put things back into it, we would have a healthier environment and society.”

No doubt DeJohnette heard his music as a model for those ideal aspirations. “Art is the spiritual equivalent of that purification, which is transmitted to us as energy – and all artists must rely on that.”