Master drummer Jack DeJohnette is part of a continuum in jazz that stretches back to the 1960s when the Chicagoan was a member of Charles Lloyd’s seminal quartet and when he made his debut as a leader. The line continued the next decade via Miles Davis and the groundbreaking album Bitches Brew, and then into the 80s and on with his own influential group Special Edition. With the foundation of the Keith Jarrett Standards Trio, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, a new chapter in both DeJohnette and Jarrett’s career began, the birth of a group that would revitalise the trio format and then influence a myriad of jazz trios keen to break the mould just as DeJohnette and Jarrett had done themselves.

Powerful, supremely supple, blessed with an immaculate sense of timing and an openness which never limits his musical choices, as a drummer, talented pianist and composer, DeJohnette long ago won the battle for hearts and minds yet continues to stimulate audiences with new projects and ideas. He plays a very special solo set and conducts a masterclass at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival this month. To set the scene, Stuart Nicholson charts DeJohnette’s career and talks to the man himself about how he played with Coltrane, the price he paid as a result of performing with Miles Davis’ electric bands, how the trio with Jarrett and Gary Peacock came about and the evolution of his own very personal sound.

Fellow drummer Otis Ray Appleton used to call Jack DeJohnette “a dialogue drummer.” Even when DeJohnette played solo, Appleton asserted, “there’s a dialogue that’s constantly going on”. It is a penetrating insight into the art of Jack DeJohnette and something audiences at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival will be able to check-out for themselves since one of the festival highlights is a Jack DeJohnette solo concert, where the most musical drummer in jazz joins in a dialogue with the spheres.
 
Long renowned for his remarkable speed around the kit, DeJohnette’s effortless knack of conjuring a huge array of sounds from the drums makes it seem as if he is tapping into some vast primal power. Yet the sounds are so articulate, so intelligently conceived, so organic and so well balanced between spontaneity and control that he has prompted musicians such as Miles Davis, John McLaughlin, Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock to hail him a master.

“In solo concerts I compose in real-time, so I usually don’t know what I’m going to do in advance, when I get into it, one thing follows another,” he says down the line from his home in Silver Hollow, a birch wooded crest in the Catskill foothills.

Still in the planning stage of his concert, he says he might use a Roland HPD15, a sampling machine he used in duet with John Surman on the Invisible Nature album from 2002. “It has all these sounds on it, it gives me the freedom to create all kinds of colours, I can pre-record things, set up beats in advance and so on”. The Roland electric drum is used as a part of his kit, and it replicates a wide range of tuned and untuned percussion sounds and can be played with either sticks or fingers.

This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #119 to read the full feature and receive a Free CD Subscribe Here...