My interview with Jack DeJohnette didn’t start 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” felt reasonable enough, but DeJohnette didn’t appreciate being pigeonholed and shot back instantly: “I’m a complete musician.” 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.
