29.10.2025 | Latest
Jack DeJohnette, multi-directional master musician, improvisational drumming genius, and a major contributor to the evolution of jazz at ECM, has died, aged 83. His first of many appearances at the label was on the 1971 recording Ruta and Daitya, a series of duets with Keith Jarrett. The last, as it stands today, was as a member of Anouar Brahem’s quartet on Blue Maqams, recorded in 2017. In between: a multitude of recordings as leader, co-leader or energizing participant across a broad range of styles and idioms. What Jack brought to any session invariably transcended a ‘sideman’’s role; he was always at the heart of the musical action and the soul of things.
On Sunday 26 October, the day of Jack’s passing, Manfred Eicher attended a screening of his film “Holozän” at the Theatiner movie theatre in the context of the Swiss film week in Munich – Jack features prominently in the score, as part of Keith Jarrett’s “standards” trio with “Ecstacy” off the 1989 album Changeless. “I came out of the movie theatre and couldn’t get the scene underscored by Keith, Jack and Gary’s playing out of my head. Jack on toms, propelling the group forward as ever, thoughtfully but with so much quiet energy. It occupied me all day…”
Born in Chicago in 1942, Jack was a classmate of Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill at Wilson Junior College on the city’s Southside. All of them, as the 1960s dawned, were committed to the newest tendencies in the music and soon drawn to the circle around Muhal Richard Abrams as the AACM began to take shape. It was a period of discovery that Jack celebrated on his 2015 recording Made In Chicago.
DeJohnette moved to New York in the mid-1960s where, as a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet he befriended pianist Keith Jarrett. Their association, which would last a lifetime, continued in Miles Davis’s groups. “Jack DeJohnette gave me a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over.” says Miles in his autobiography.
Manfred Eicher’s productions featuring Jack through ECM’s first decade now read like a list of classics – among them John Abercrombie’s Timeless, and Gateway (with 
Abercrombie and Dave Holland), Collin Walcott’s Cloud Dance, Kenny Wheeler’s Gnu High and Deer Wan, the eponymously-titled Terje Rypdal/Miroslav Vitous/Jack DeJohnette, Steve Kuhn’s Trance, Mick Goodrick’s In Pas(s)ing, Jan Garbarek’s Places, Ralph Towner’s Batik, Bill Connors’s Of Mist And Melting. Gary Peacock’s Tales of Another introduced the line-up with Jarrett and DeJohnette, later to be revived as the “Standards Trio”. The list goes on. Pat Metheny’s 80/81 found Jack powering an all-star improvisers’ band with Mike Brecker, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden. At the conclusion of Ornette Coleman’s tune “Turnaround”, you can hear Haden whoop his approval: “Whoo-hoo! Jack DeJohnette, man!!!”
Jack’s musicality and unique touch were the subject of the almost-solo Pictures, where he played drums and piano and organ, joined by John Abercrombie on a few tracks. The stripped down context focusses attention on the detail and fluidity of Jack’s cymbal playing and the album becomes an essay in subtly-shifting texture.
His New Directions quartet of 1978 – with Lester Bowie, John Abercrombie, and Eddie Gomez – surveyed the nature of the journey so far – with trumpeter Bowie, the flamboyant frontman from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, embodying the devil-may-care rebelliousness of free jazz, guitarist Abercrombie alluding to adventures at the borders of jazz-rock, and Eddie Gomez a link to shared experiences of playing with Bill Evans. Jack: “With four strong musical personalities, we could cover a lot of ground, and the chemistry was fantastic.”
The first edition of Special Edition, launched in ’79 brought two of the extroverted voices from the New York loft scene – Arthur Blythe and David Murray – into its frontline, with a debut album revolving around new DeJohnette tunes and a brace of Coltrane covers. John Coltrane was a permanent touchstone for DeJohnette: Jack felt honoured to have played with the master briefly in the 1960s – once substituting for an absent Elvin Jones, and later joining Rashied Ali as one of two drummers near the end of Coltrane’s life. On the 2015 recording In Movement Jack introduced a trio with Ravi Coltrane on saxes and Matthew Garrison on bass guitar, electronics and loops, bringing the Coltrane group legacy into the present tense.
Another important connection, over the decades, was the work with John Surman. Jack and John’s recordings include the duo albums The Adventures of Simon Simon – music from which has been much requested by film makers – and the live Invisible Nature, recorded at the Tampere Jazz Happening and Jazzfest Berlin. Free And Equal, meanwhile, features the Surman-DeJohnette duo together with the classical and contemporary music ensemble London Brass in concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The same London venue would also be the site of a recording by Trio Beyond, Jack’s group with guitarist John Scofield and organist Larry Goldings, paying tribute to the music and spirit of Tony Williams Lifetime on Saudades.
And then, of course, there is the Standards Trio – Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette – whose 1983 recordings with Manfred Eicher at New York’s Power Station, intended initially as a one-off dip into the world of the American songbook became, by popular request, an ongoing enterprise. For thirty years the trio was one of the best-loved groups in jazz, leaving behind a trail of recordings, mostly live recordings, in which jazz standards were considered from multiple perspectives. Sometimes it was about carefully honouring the composition, the form and shape of the song. Sometimes it was about building something new, improvising on the template of the material and sometimes it was about breaking free of the song altogether – as on the albums Changeless, Always Let Me Go and Inside Out. Jack DeJohnette was open to every option, every solution, a complete musician finding the magic in the moment.
