In Memorium, Jack DeJohnette (1942-2025)
By Fritz Byers
There’s a YouTube video of the jazz quartet, occasionally referred to as Parallel Realities, comprising the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist Dave Holland, the guitarist Pat Metheny, and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, performing live in 1990. The concert begins with Jack playing solo for about two minutes before he is joined, in turn, by Dave, Herbie, and finally Pat. And then they are off, assaying “Shadow Dance” for 15 minutes.
You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HavNHaJHnVI
If, upon reading of Jack’s passing last Sunday and the flood of praise that followed, you wonder, who, or what, or why – you’ll find the answers, or at least part of them, in those two minutes.
From his rise in the 1960s as part of Charles Lloyd’s genre-bending quartet, Jack was a pulsing omnipresence in the music and some of its most intriguing adjacencies. (I’m thinking now of his 2002 pairing with the Gambian kora wizard, Foday Musa Suso, which produced Music from the Hearts of the Masters, a, yes, masterpiece that manages to be at once contemplative and adventurous. And of course his acclaimed 2005 solo release, Music in the Key of Om, which, improbably but justifiably, was nominated for a Grammy as the Best New Age Album. Jack DeJohnette? New Age? Yep. Here he blends percussion and synthesizer to create a sustained mood of ambient chill.)
A few pals and I were recently talking about stellar interludes in the lives of various athletes. (My nominations were Greg Maddux from ‘92 to ‘95 and Roger Federer from ‘04 to ‘07.)
How’s this for a four-year stretch:
In 1966, Jack was the drummer on two of the most influential records of the era, Charles Lloyd’s Forest Flower and that group’s live recording in Europe;
In 1967, in addition to his continuing work with Charles, Jack was the rhythmic heart of two marvelous recordings, Joe Henderson’s Tetragon and Jackie McLean’s Demon Dance;
In 1968, he toured Europe with Bill Evans, the defining pianist of the generation, producing a legendary live recording at Montreux as well as a series of recordings from that year recently issued by Resonance Records;
And in 1969 he was the primary drummer on Miles’s Davis Bitches Brew, a rock-infused jolt to the jazz world that changed all sorts of hearts and minds and that is now revered as one of Miles’s, and therefore one of music’s greatest recordings.
My introduction to Jack’s music came in the summer of 1979 when I visited a friend in Chicago midway through a cross-country jaunt west. As we exchanged updates, our evening’s soundtrack was the just-released debut of New Directions, Jack’s innovative quartet with the guitarist John Abercrombie, the bassist Eddie Gomez, and the trumpeter Lester Bowie, the co-founder of the great Art Ensemble of Chicago. I’d never heard anything like it: Jack’s inviting compositions, which to my ears showed in part what he’d learned Bill Evan’s rootless chordal harmonies, played by a band of equals in evershifting patterns of individual prominence and regression that showed an appreciation of open spaces amid the cascade of sound.
Within a year, Jack invented his other great group, Special Edition, a pianoless quartet with David Murray and Arthur Blythe on reeds and Peter Warren on bass and cello. Their eponymous first release is one of jazz’s great albums. Jack, who began his musical life as a pianist, plays piano and melodica, in addition to drums, and he contributed three of the tunes, including the two unmatched compositions that open the record: “One for Eric” and “Zoot Suite.”
Jack kept Special Edition going for about a decade and a half, with changes in membership but an unyielding dedication to melodic ingenuity and volatile rhythmic drive. All the while, he appeared as a sideman on scores of records. Everyone wanted to play with him. And he could do anything.
When called upon to anchor a piano trio, as with Keith Jarrett in the long-running Standards Trio, or with McCoy Tyner, Eliane Elias, Joanne Brackeen, Richie Beirach, or many others, Jack was unfailingly musical, precise in his timekeeping and tuneful in his filigrees. In broader settings, such as his work with the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler or with Pat Metheny on Pat’s marvelous 80/81, he would venture into a more elastic kind of timekeeping, as avant as anyone in the garde.
I think of Jack as being, at heart, a completely free player. We should always remember that he was, as he titled his late-in-life release, Made in Chicago. On that record, which captures a 2013 performance at the Chicago Jazz Festival with Chicago-born legends Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill, Jack is consistently electrifying. His energy, his musical empathy, his melodic sense of drumming, and his propensity for the perfect placement of unexpected rhythmic accents or for full-on sound tornadoes are on full display. I hear this album as Jack’s homage to his home town, in small part a sentimental look back but much more obviously an invitation, maybe a mandate, to keep making it new.