It was a sad shock this past weekend to learn that an unquestioned giant of music, an artist who for so long loved our Hudson Valley community and called it home, had left us. Local resident Jack DeJohnette, widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential drummers in the history of jazz, died on October 26 at the age of 83.
DeJohnette, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, first came to prominence in the jazz world in the 1960s via his work with saxophonist Charles Lloyd and, most famously, trumpeter Miles Davis, and later became a revered band leader and composer in his own right. As young boy he started out on piano but soon switched to drums, playing along with records that featured Art Blakey, Max Roach, Vernel Fournier, and other iconic drummers. He played with Sun Ra’s band, saxophonist Eddie Harris, pianist Mulhal Richard Abrams, and other Chicago locals and sat in with the visiting John Coltrane Quartet before moving to New York in 1964. There he worked with saxophonist Jackie McClean and Coltrane pianist McCoy Tyner before joining Lloyd’s nascent quartet, which drew inspiration from the emerging psychedelic rock scene and played with acts like the Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. He soon caught the ear of Davis, who invited him to be part of his new psych-influenced group.
After releasing his first album as a leader, 1968’s The DeJohnette Complex, DeJohnette joined Davis’s new “electric band” and pioneered jazz-rock fusion, recording 1970’s groundbreaking album Bitches Brew and its followups, Live-Evil (1971), Jack Johnson (1971), and On the Corner (1972). He left Davis’s group in 1972 to release more solo albums and play with Stan Getz and others before forming the short-lived quintet Compost and the trio Gateway with two likewise-prominent Hudson Valley players, bassist Dave Holland (an ex-Davis bandmate) and guitarist John Abercrombie. His bands New Directions and Special Edition followed, as did time with his fellow Charles Lloyd Quartet veteran Keith Jarrett’s jazz-standards piano trio, guitar great Pat Metheney, and myriad other projects.
In the early 1970s DeJohnette and his family moved to Woodstock, and he reveled in living in such an artistically nurturing area, taking the opportunity whenever possible to give some of that nurturing back by lending his talents to events and projects on behalf of social causes. “I’ve always had a very spiritual outlook with music, which is also something I experienced with Trane and Mulhal,” he told me in 2010, one of several times that I spoke with him for Chronogram. “It’s good to do something that really focuses on the healing properties music has.” In recent years, DeJohnette formed a trio with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist Matthew Garrison, the sons of, respectively, John Coltrane and Coltrane bassist Jimmy Garrison; performed with tap dancer Savion Glover; and returned to the piano, recording and playing concerts that featured him on that instrument in lieu of percussion.
“One of my favorite memories of Jack DeJohnette,” recalls local drummer Jeff “Siege” Siegel in a Facebook post, “I was playing a New Year’s Eve gig with my friends John Menegon and Teri Roiger. Jack and Kenny Burrell came to hear us. At midnight, when we were about to play (of course) ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ Jack appeared next to me and said, ‘Let me sit in so you can dance with your wife.’ A little example of the greatness and thoughtfulness of Jack DeJohnette, the person. His greatness in music was not eclipsed by the wonderful person that he was.”
“[W]e still have the music,” DeJohnette said in 2010. “It’s imprinted into the ether, in what I call the ‘Cosmic Library of Consciousness.’ It’s in the air like the radio, and we can just tap into it whenever we want to, forever.”
Jack DeJohnette is survived by his wife Lydia and their daughters, Farah and Minya. We here at Chronogram send them, and the musician’s many friends and fans, our deepest condolences and love.
