Jack DeJohnette, one of the most daring and dynamic jazz drummers of the last 60 years, with a loose-limbed yet exacting beat that propelled a limitless range of adventurous music, died on Sunday at HealthAlliance Hospital in Kingston, N.Y. He was 83.
The cause was congestive heart failure, Lydia DeJohnette, his wife and manager, tells NPR.
DeJohnette had a singular voice at the drums: earthy and elastic, instantly recognizable. Rather than focus the articulation of tempo on his ride cymbal, he often distributed his emphasis around the drum set. He adapted this flowing approach from modern jazz innovators like Roy Haynes as well as avant-garde pioneers like Rashied Ali, devising what he called a multidirectional style.
In another sense, he moved in multiple directions throughout his career. He played with impeccable sensitivity in acoustic small groups, like a pair of illustrious piano trios led by Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. He exuded combustible intensity in other settings, including the quartet that brought saxophonist Charles Lloyd to The Fillmore in San Francisco, and the larger confab that trumpeter Miles Davis led into the frontier of psychedelic jazz-funk. Across hundreds of recordings and many more live performances — with everyone from saxophonist Sonny Rollins to guitarist Pat Metheny to harpist and keyboardist Alice Coltrane — he was an ever-surprising yet steadfast source of rhythmic ingenuity, alert to every nuance in a stream of interactions.
He was also a prolific bandleader and composer with dozens of albums to his name. One of his earliest groups was the influential trio Gateway, which he co-led with guitarist John Abercrombie and bassist Dave Holland. His band Directions, also featuring Abercrombie, leaned more pointedly into aspects of fusion. His most acclaimed ensemble was Special Edition, a rugged but chamberlike unit that featured free-thinking collaborators like tenor saxophonist David Murray and baritone saxophonist and tubaist Howard Johnson.
DeJohnette's first instrument was piano, and he maintained that facet of his musical identity, making the occasional album — like The Jack DeJohnette Piano Album, in 1985, and Return in 2016 — and performing solo piano concerts, like one last year at the Woodstock Playhouse, near his home in the Catskills. He often said being a pianist made him a better drummer, because he had a deeper understanding of harmony and tone.
His two Grammy Awards speak to the breadth of his musical expression. In 2022 he won best jazz instrumental album for Skyline, an elegant trio effort with pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and bassist Ron Carter. And in 2009 he won best new age album for Peace Time, an hourlong ambient statement on which he plays synthesizers and percussion; he released it on his own label, Golden Beams.
"The best gift that I have is the ability to listen," DeJohnette said in a video profile produced for his 2012 induction as an NEA Jazz Master. "Not only listen audibly but also listen with my heart."
Jack DeJohnette, Jr. was born in Chicago on Aug. 9, 1942, to Jack DeJohnette and the former Eva Jeanette Wood, who had each moved north during the Great Migration. He was raised on the South Side, mainly by his grandmother, Rosalie Anne Wood. She encouraged his early musical interests, setting him up around age 5 with a local piano teacher, and buying a Wurlitzer Spinet piano for the house.
His uncle, Roy Wood, Sr. was a jazz enthusiast with a hand-crank Victrola and a stash of 78 rpm records; he'd later become a pioneering African American disc jockey, and co-founder of the National Black Network. Young Jack pored over his uncle's record collection, listened raptly to the radio, and tagged along to shows. By his late teenage years, he was gigging as a pianist — and training himself to be a drummer, which he found came naturally.
DeJohnette was coming of age at a time of expansive musical possibilities in Chicago, where modern jazz, the blues and R&B were commingling with staunchly unclassifiable approaches. He played with the Sun Ra Arkestra, and with the soul-jazz tenor saxophonist and keyboardist Eddie Harris. And he fell in with a cadre of fiercely independent thinkers — like pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell — just as they were beginning to form the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (known as the AACM) in 1965.
The following year, DeJohnette moved to New York, where he hit the ground running. On his first night in town, as he recalled last year in an episode of The Late Set podcast, he headed to Minton's Playhouse in Harlem and sat in with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who immediately counted off a supersonic tempo. (It was so fast, he said, that the bassist resorted to playing at half-speed.) He handled this trial by fire with no problem whatsoever. "Basically, to play that way, you have to be relaxed," he explained. "You can't have any tension whatsoever, so that you can focus on your ideas instead of how you're dealing with it physically."
An extraordinary recording released last year, sourced from DeJohnette's personal archive, perfectly captures this blazing intensity. Titled Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs', it features a short-lived quartet led by pianist McCoy Tyner and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, with bassist Henry Grimes. (Full disclosure: I wrote this album's liner notes.) At the time it was recorded, in the spring of 1966, DeJohnette had only been in New York for a matter of months.
He was already working alongside pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Cecil McBee in the newly formed Charles Lloyd Quartet, which recorded for Atlantic Records, and became a regular fixture in the burgeoning hippie counterculture. The group's 1967 album Forest Flower, recorded at the Monterey Jazz Festival, was a crossover hit, and Lloyd was hailed (and in some corners, dismissed) as an ambassador bringing jazz to youthful audiences.
That notion applied no less in this era to Miles Davis, who was in the process of retooling his sound to reflect the urgency of Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. DeJohnette joined Davis' band during this alchemical transformation, recording on the landmark Bitches Brew and several subsequent albums. In 1970 he powered the group that performed at the Isle of Wight Festival, for a crowd estimated to exceed half a million people.
Jarrett, who also played in this edition of Davis' band, would become one of DeJohnette's steadiest musical associates. In the early '70s they made an experimental duo album, Ruta and Daitya, for the recently established ECM Records. Then in 1983, Jarrett formed a trio with DeJohnette and bassist Gary Peacock, for the stated purpose of interpreting material from the standard songbook. This group would be a major concert attraction for the next 30 years.
DeJohnette's own output reflected a deep investment in groove and an equally serious commitment to abstraction. He formed Trio Beyond with guitarist John Scofield and organist Larry Goldings, releasing an album called Saudades in 2006. Scofield, keyboardist John Medeski and bassist Larry Grenadier later joined him for Hudson, a 2017 album inspired by their shared connection to the Woodstock area, as a place of residence and a cultural totem.
The Jack DeJohnette Group, which he formed in 2010, explored a mercurial strain of fusion, with catalysts like alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and guitarist David Fiuczynski. He led another intergenerational combo, with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and electric bassist Matthew Garrison, on the album In Movement, released on ECM in 2016.
DeJohnette never wavered in his commitment to sonic exploration, maintaining his close ties to trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and multi-reedist Roscoe Mitchell. He helped organize a tribute to the AACM — with Mitchell, multi-reedist Henry Threadgill, pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, and bassist Larry Gray — that yielded the album Made in Chicago.
"I think for all of us, the music is there for people to approach with an open mind," DeJohnette told me in 2015, speaking at his home. "It's creative music presented at a high level. We all take it very seriously."
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