# Fictional review of Jack DeJohnette: He was more than a jazz drummer – a superhuman force in music: Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2025/10/30/fictional-review-of-jack-dejohnette-he-was-more-than-a-jazz-drummer-a-superhuman-force-in-music-videos-photos/
- Published: 2025-10-30T18:52:11+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Considered by many as one of the great drummers in modern jazz history, Jack DeJohnette
has died at the age of 83. DeJohnette had a wide-ranging style that made him a dynamic
sideman and bandleader. He played with virtually every major jazz figure from the
1960s on, including Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins 
and Abbey Lincoln. His versatility on the drums was accented by DeJohnette’s additional
accomplishments as a keyboardist: he studied classical piano for ten years before
taking up drums.**

With a complex playing style that was nevertheless generous towards other musicians,
the US musician was in a category all of his own․

My interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t start well. It was the summer of 2016 and
DeJohnette was in London to play with Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. Referring 
to him in my first question as a “drummer” felt reasonable enough, but DeJohnette
didn’t appreciate being pigeonholed and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.”

![Jack DeJohnette at 2012 Newport Jazz Festival](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/
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A few days later, sitting in the Royal Festival Hall watching the Standards Trio,
a moment of transcendent magic thrilled me as Jarrett sustained a long sequence 
of repeated notes high up on the piano and DeJohnette powered the music forwards
with a labyrinthian drum solo as harmonically searching as anything Jarrett had 
played. Complete musician indeed.

“The idea of improvisation,” DeJohnette told me, “is tied up in the very nature 
of our existence. 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 further explained that each part of his drum kit he considered to be a musical
being “in its own right”. 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 could never be contained by the conventions 
of drum technique. He was also a pianist of considerable merit – who released a 
solo piano album, Return, in 2016 – and every facet of his musicianship seemed to
be on display all of the time, until his death this week aged 83.

Many drummers tune their kit to a bespoke design, but DeJohnette’s playing exhibited
a life-force that was entirely his own. To hear him play 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 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 allowed Davis, and subsequently
saxophonist Gary Bartz, all the space they needed to explore, while DeJohnette packed
his playing with rattling rhythmic asides – keeping a continual discussion with 
the other musicians.

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 remained doggedly independent.

![Jack DeJohnette at the 2017 Newport Jazz Festival](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/
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The compositions DeJohnette wrote for his album were harmonically ornate and asserted
jazz/rock energy while also occasionally leaning towards free-form improvisation.
He featured himself playing melodica, and his folky melodic inventions soared.

The DeJohnette Complex demonstrated that DeJohnette’s aesthetic was indeed delightfully
complex 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 duetted on some tracks with guitarist John
Abercrombie, an album that was sparse and bare-bones 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 too.

Surman and DeJohnette played their usual instruments while also doubling on keyboards
and synthesisers, subsuming their own identities inside lavishly orchestrated soundscapes
of pastoral tones.

Another essential album was Oneness, recorded in 1997, which dealt up large-scale
structures with pieces such as Free Above Sea and Priestesses of the Mist, their
titles mirroring the elemental force unleashed by the music. Listening to that album
around the time of its release, I was reminded of an earlier encounter with DeJohnette,
when I heard his group Special Edition play in Leeds during the late 1980s. This
performance was in no hurry to stake out its terrain, as ambient, slow-burn forms
gradually telescoped towards rhythmic blows.

Talking to DeJohnette all those years later, these ideas of stress-testing form 
and scale made more sense. He told me how he loved playing those funk figurations
with Davis because “I could sit in grooves and let them saturate me”, but also spoke
of his desire to generate more wide-angled musical soundscapes, always open-ended
and therefore healthy for the brain.

He complained about the “safe confines” of pop music with its repetitive patterns.“
With improvisation, though,” he said, “you’re open to a full range of possibilities.
People are capable of being very creative but only seem to tap into their potential
when there is a major earthquake or something. But if people were more conscious
of our place within nature, stopped abusing the Earth 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 purification, which is passed to us as energy–
and all artists have to draw on that.”

![Jack DeJohnette at the 2019 Summerstage](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/
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