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| Jack DeJohnette.photo from the ECM website |
When Jack DeJohnette played the drums, it sounded as if James Brown was singing the music of Miles Davis. Or the one of Albert Ayler. Admittedly, it takes a certain amount of imagination to hear the intricate percussion patterns of the jazz drummer from Chicago, the soulful ballads of the king of funk and R&B, and the specific timbres of the great jazz revolutionaries together.
For DeJohnette, this meant natural expression of vocal and instrumental leadership, an uninterrupted sequence of colors, rhythms, and moods, and perfect technique whose flawlessness was not flaunted. Musical natural phenomena, in other words.
Jack DeJohnette’s vocal sensibility apparently enabled him to transform robust rhythms into smooth melodies and textures, making not only the cymbals sing, but the entire drum set. When he played the drums, a big, powerfully intensifying sound always came out, a unique, free groove.
Jack DeJohnette had the best teachers one could have: Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchel, and Joseph Jarman, the musical social workers from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in his hometown, and later the hardcore avant-garde around John Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Elvin Jones, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis in New York. He first took piano lessons from the age of four to fourteen and switched to drums in high school; his musical role model at the time was Max Roach. He then studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. In his early years in Chicago, he played a wide range of music, from rhythm and blues to free jazz. In 1966, he moved to New York and accompanied organist John Patton on drums, worked with Jackie McLean, and accompanied singers Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln. From 1966 to 1969, he was a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet alongside the young Keith Jarrett, the first “psychedelic jazz group”, which made him internationally famous, as Lloyd’s group was the first jazz band to also play in front of a rock audience, e.g. together with Grateful Dead. After playing with Miles Davis in several sessions in November 1968, he joined the Miles Davis band in the summer of 1969, replacing Tony Williams and participating in the recordings for Bitches Brew. DeJohnette remained in the Davis band, with interruptions, until June 1972 (during the recording of On the Corner), when he was replaced by Al Foster. By this time at the latest, he was one of the most influential jazz drummers.
His aesthetic openness, alertly picking up on his fellow musicians’ ideas, supporting and developing them, has probably made Jack DeJohnette the jazz drummer with the most and most diverse recordings in the recent history of jazz. Like Keith Jarrett, he benefited from his early collaboration with the Munich-based ECM label.
It is almost impossible to count the number of Jack DeJohnette’s recordings that have become milestones in jazz music. These include the live recording with the wonderful pianist Bill Evans from the 1968 Montreux Jazz Festival and basically all eight recordings with Miles Davis’ band.
Additionally, there is the serene musical artistry with his own groups Direction with saxophonist Alex Foster, John Abercrombie on guitar, and Peter Warren on bass; New Direction again with John Abercrombie, Lester Bowie on trumpet, and Eddie Gomez on bass; Special Edition with saxophonists Arthur Blythe and David Murray and again with Peter Warren (the eponymous album is perhaps the one record you need from DeJohnette when it comes to recordings under his name). These are just the most notable ones. And finally, there are all the fantastic recordings with Keith Jarrett and Gary Peacock, who subjected the standard repertoire of the piano trio to a test of modern jazz counterpoint. They began touring in the early 1980s and released over 20 albums as a trio under Jarrett’s name over the next three decades. They deliberately took a step back, playing standards, that canon of jazz that is so successful because even the masses know the pieces, but so difficult because everything has already been said in this repertoire. But that’s where the three of them shone with their knack for discovering new depths even in well-worn tracks. The CD box set Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note - The Complete Recordings is a recording for the ages.
The list of projects Jack DeJohnette has worked on in the studio and on stage over the past few decades is long. His own trio with John Coltrane’s son Ravi and Matthew Garrison, son of Coltrane bassist Jimmy, once again explored the entire spectrum of African-American culture, from Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Serpentine Fire“ to Coltrane’s “Alabama“ (on In Movement, ECM, 2016). It was a statement of support for the revolution in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement, which showed that civil rights in the US have been against stake again. DeJohnette returned to his roots in Chicago, when jazz was not music for its own sake, but a manifesto for liberation and progress. It was his last battle. On Sunday, Jack DeJohnette died at home in Woodstock, surrounded by his family and friends.
Watch the recording sessions for In Movement, recorded at New York’s Avatar Studios in October 2015, produced by Manfred Eicher.
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