Another Beat is Lost: Jack DeJohnette 1942-2025
Jack DeJohnette-New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. – April 22, 2016
Jack DeJohnette lived where artistry meets pulse. A master of rhythm, texture and sound, he left the planet on October 26, 2025, aged 83, leaving behind one of the most definitive legacies in Jazz.
Born August 9, 1942, in Chicago, he began his musical life at the piano at age four, shifting to drums as a teenager while still exploring melody from the keyboard. He once framed the two as siblings in the same sonic family: his ears always open to orchestration in what others might mistake for pure rhythm. “I grew up in Chicago with blues bands and singers and rock and roll, you know, and funk,” he told me in 1990. “So that stuff isn’t foreign to me. That’s all a part of Jack DeJohnette.”
There are moments in jazz when the ground shifts, and DeJohnette stood in the epicenter of several. He was a part of the Charles Lloyd ensemble with Keith Jarrett that produced some of the saxophonist’s most consequential albums. In the late ’60s he joined Miles Davis during a period of radical reinvention. His drumming fueled era-defining statements like Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, and On the Corner, where pulse wasn’t just kept, but invented, expanded, warped into new possibilities of sound. He recalled those sessions as spontaneous cartography, mapping a changing landscape.
But DeJohnette was never content to exist solely inside someone else’s evolution. Across projects like Special Edition, New Directions, Compost, and decades of collaboration with ECM Records, he created sound worlds where groove and abstraction coexisted, where atmospheric drumming and challenging compositions invited not just listening, but inhabiting. His Gateway trio with guitarist John Abercrombie and bassist Dave Holland were lessons in unbridled improvisation. His trio albums with guitarist Terje Rypdal and bassist Miroslav Vitous were journeys into textural interplay.
Critics called him a colorist, an epigrammatic commentator shaping the architecture of ensemble sound. Of course, his work on albums like On the Corner, showed that he could drive a groove like the best R&B drummers. For DeJohnette, performance was a channeling, a “different head-space,” a connection to a cosmic library of ideas. Sometimes he was really cosmic, like his albums, Music in the Key of Om and Peace Time, the latter of which won him a New Age Grammy Award. He was nominated for six Grammys and won another for a session with pianist Gonzalo Rubalcalba, but he should’ve received many Grammys for his own jazz works.
In retrospect, I have a warmer feeling toward Peace Time than I did in 2007. It is a warm and inviting 60 minute journey with DeJohnette playing all the instruments including flute. It’s a contemplative, immersive meditation that Andre 3000 could only hope to aspire to. DeJohnette often went off course from conventional jazz navigation.
I asked DeJohnette about these albums and in particular, his 1990 release, Zebra, with trumpeter Lester Bowie and DeJohnette playing synthesizer. I told him no one would recognize this as Jack DeJohnette.
“Yeah, but the idea is not for it to be Jack DeJohnette, he stated. “The idea was that it’s a tone poem soundtrack. In other words I see the album as an environmental type of music. I don’t even see it as a jazz record.”
That interviewed happened to take place backstage at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia where he had just finished a 150-minute set with his Parallel Realities supergroup that included guitarist Pat Metheny, pianist Herbie Hancock and bassist Dave Holland. That was jazz in its most delirious grandeur.
“It’s sort of like cross between a Bluenote jazz date and a very like elaborately sequenced pop thing,” explained Metheny after that same concert. “ It’s a unique, cool thing. It’s something that, you know personally I really enjoy doing something that’s different conceptually like that. As opposed to just going in the studio and playing ‘All The Things You Are’ or playing with a totally precise sequence part that you are locked into and it makes everything sound stiff.“
There was nothing stiff about this band live, or any of DeJohnette’s live performances.
Much of the backend of DeJohnette’s career was spent as part of Keith Jarret’s Standard’s Trio
His impact is deep not just in recordings, but in reimagining the role of the drummer itself: not behind the band, but within it: framing space, refracting conversation, expanding the possibilities of time. As accolades accumulated – multiple Grammys, NEA Jazz Master status- his influence radiated far beyond the awards, into the drummers and improvisers who realized that percussion could be architecture, narrative, and exploration at once.
He passed in Woodstock, New York, surrounded by his wife Lydia and close friends—in the autumn settling of the Hudson Valley.
Jack DeJohnette was the drummer’s drummer, the musician’s musician. Although he was a multi-instrumentalist, it’s as a drummer that he created immersive worlds, both driving ensembles and encapsulating them in a sonic architecture that morphed in transformative designs. Rest in Rhythm and Color!
ohhhh wow! Just learning of his passing. He was amazing!