My Conversation with Jazz (and more) Drummer (and more) Jack DeJohnette
Here’s another interview from the archive of the podcast I created in Japan around 10 years ago called The American Radio Show, on which I tried to tap into some of the cultural wealth that passes through Japan, mostly invisibly because the Japanese media is pretty much monolingual.
I interviewed astronaut Naoko Yamazaki, movie producer and director Roger Corman, actor and political activist George Takei, composer Philip Glass, jazz musicians Gregory Porter, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Lee Ritenour and Dave Grusin; U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos; Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki, and a bunch of others.
I started out thinking I would interview only visiting Americans, and I got funding from the U.S. Embassy Tokyo to support the project, but then I had opportunities to speak with people like Naoko Yamazaki, and I expanded my brief to “people with a connection to the U.S.A.”; Naoko had, of course, trained with NASA in Houston for years, and she knew what a Hostess Twinkie was. Fumihiko Maki had studied at Harvard, and worked at Washington University in St. Louis (but I’m not sure he knows what a Twinkie is).
Today’s post is an interview with Jack DeJohnette. Of all the talented people I interviewed while I produced The American Radio Show, DeJohnette was my favorite. He was so knowledgeable and so thoughtful, I was gripped by our conversation, and I was sorry not to have had more time with him.
I hope you find it interesting, and thanks for reading! Subscribing is free, so please feel free to forward to anyone you think may also be interested.
Jack DeJohnette is an American drummer, percussionist, pianist and composer who has worked with Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Betty Carter and Stan Getz, among many, many others. In fact, the list of jazz greats DeJohnette hasn’t played with is much shorter than the list of his collaborators.
I interviewed DeJohnette almost 10 years ago, when he was in Tokyo with pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Gary Peacock on the 30th anniversary tour of their Standards Trio, but for most of his career, he has ranged far and wide across the jazz spectrum, and in 2009 won a Grammy Award for Best New Age album, with ‘Peace Time’.
In 2013, DeJohnette’s longtime record label, ECM, released a box set collecting the first four albums of his ‘Special Edition’ band, recordings that date from 1979 to 1984, and the most recent (and final) album released by the Standards Trio is ‘Somewhere’, recorded live in Lucerne in 2009.
I’ve heard the Standards Trio play live at least a half dozen times over the years, and I interviewed DeJohnette at his hotel before one of the Tokyo concerts, which I had tickets to, and which was fantastic. As usual.
I should note that since I interviewed DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett has had a pair of serious strokes that caused paralysis on his left side, and pretty much render him unable to play the piano. Gary Peacock was going deaf when I heard the standards trio play in Tokyo, and died in 2020, aged 85. The Standards Trio stopped performing in 2014, very probably because of Peacock’s incipient deafness.
Q. How did the Trio start, and how did it come to endure for 30 years?
JDJ. It started when Keith and I did a gig for ECM, Manfred Eicher’s label, on ‘Tales of Another’, a bunch of Gary’s pieces. I think one of the things that Manfred liked about the three of us was that we’d all played for Miles Davis. The idea of having a trio, Manfred suggested it, and we talked about it, and at first we thought about playing original music. But then Keith suggested we could use standards as a focal point for improvisation. How have we endured? I think because we play every piece as if it were new for the first time. Prepare for the unexpected, and go with it.
Q. You’re not only a drummer, but also a pianist and composer, and you’ve played with an incredible number of great musicians. When you started out, you started with Miles Davis? or did you start somewhere else, and get an introduction to Miles at some point?
JDJ. Well, I started out in Chicago, where I was born and raised, as a pianist. That was my first instrument. I started playing with people like Eddie Harris, and Muhal Richard Abrams, who was a legend, and many others. I got grounded in all kinds of music in Chicago, before I came to New York. When I came to New York I started sitting in with various people, and my first major gig was with Jackie McLean. When I was working with Jackie, Miles [Davis] came to see us play. And Jackie said to me, “Miles and I have the same taste in drummers. Miles is going to hire you one day.”
I switched to drums when I came to New York. I went up to a session with Freddie Hubbard in Harlem, and fortunately, I had brought a set of drums with me, and the organist John Patton was in that session, and he said to me, “Hey, man, if you’ve got a set of drums, you’ve got a gig.” And that’s when I made a decision to make the drums my main instrument. I had been playing them for some time, and my drum playing was as good as my piano playing. And they’re all related – drums, percussion, piano, vibes – they’re all in the percussion family. And the way I have my drums tuned, I can use them to play melodies. I perceive myself as a ‘colorist’ of music, who happens to play the drum set.
Q. When you came to the drums, how did you see jazz drumming and who were the inspirations for you? And now, the world is much, much smaller, and it’s much easier to play with a wide range of different drummers. How has that changed jazz drumming over the course of your career?
JDJ. When I was coming up, as far as drummers go, I was listening to Kenny Clark, Max Roach, Roy Haines, and Art Blakey, of course, and some local drummers who had a profound influence on me, including the legendary Wilbur Campbell. Wilbur played vibes as well, and I hung out with him, and picked up a lot from watching him, and listening to him.
I took from different players. I studied all those guys. I did what most musicians do, and added and subtracted to create my own style. A lot of musicians, we study and try to play some of the signature things from musicians we admire, and then try to turn them around, make them into something new. And that’s what I’m still doing. I’ve intentionally developed a style that works in any kind of context – playing with Indian musicians, African musicians – I just go where it is. And have fun with it. I listen, I study, I ask questions.
Music has always been a world music. The genres have been created by the music industry. But all music – classical, jazz, rock – music is folk music. A couple of rock bands – The Who, and Yes – have used classical training to create their sound in a very sophisticated way. Sophisticated arrangements, and chords, and words.
Q. In the trio, you’re improvising, and you’re also collaborating and you have to be aware of everything everyone else is doing. Does Keith have the lead and you and Gary are supporting him, or does the lead shift depending on different things?
JDJ. Keith is really a master at improvisation. He wanted to be one of the best improvisers in the world, and he is. Not to say that anybody else can’t do that, but the level at which he does it, and the consistency with which he does it, is phenomenal. Totally phenomenal.
Gary and I both play piano, so we’re a “deep listening” trio. Listening intently. Keith sets the tone, but there are times when Gary might start playing something, or I might go off and do something, and Keith has said if we get inspired, we should play it, and he will join in. It just depends on when that inspiration hits one of us.
Q. In your own work as a bandleader, it doesn’t seem so usual that a drummer is the bandleader. When did you decide to form your own group, and why?
JDJ. Well, more drummers now are complete musicians, who write and compose. There are lots of examples of guys who write, and lead bands. But for me, the motivation to do that is the desire to play your own music. To write it and play it with people who can interpret it, and bring your music to life. I’ve had quite a few different bands over the years. Just this year, ECM put out a Jack DeJohnette collection, ‘Special Edition’, which gave people a chance to appreciate me as a composer, and not just as a drummer.
Q. As a composer, is there something you have been trying to say through music in a certain style?
JDJ. My music is informed by the environment we live in, the musicians who inspire me, and also the musicians in the group, the personalities. I hear the way the musicians play, and I write things around those concepts. When I put together a band, I just try to find people I like, people whose playing resonates with the way I like to write. I like to get people of what I consider high quality, whose playing will keep my music at a high standard. In recent years that’s included Rudresh Mahanthappa and David Fiuczynski. Jerome Harris has been with me through a lot of different combinations. And Don Byron ... Tim Ries. The motivation for that one was to write melodies, and grooves, and to invite my friends, people I like to hear play, to join me.
Q. You’ve done a lot of things that could be called “world music”, but now it’s just called music. Because the world is smaller, or the world of music is smaller. What are you doing now, and what do you hope to do next?
JDJ. Now, I have a quartet, with Don Byron, and with George Colligan, And I also have the Jack DeJohnette Trio, with Ravi Coltrane and Matthew Garrison, the son of Jimmy Garrison. I played with both their fathers, with John Coltrane, and separately with Jimmy, in a band that I led. We have really nice chemistry there.
Another one I’m really excited about is in August. The Chicago Jazz Festival will be spotlighting Chicago musicians one evening, and they asked me to come, with a group of us they’re calling “Chicago Legends”. We’re going to record that, and see if that is good enough to release. And if it’s not, we’ll go in the studio and record there. It’s really exciting to reunite with those guys.
And then the other project I’m involved with is an all-star quartet, which features Joe Lovano, Esperanza Spalding and Leo Genovese on the keyboards. My wife came up with the name – The Spring Quartet – as opposed to a string quartet.
Q. You travel the world, and you have a chance to meet many people, in many cultures, and the drum is probably the oldest instrument, found in almost every culture. Do you ever have a chance to play with musicians when you travel, outside of your concert gigs? Do you ever feel there are rules – which sometimes you might not know – when you collaborate with musicians from other cultures?
JDJ. I played with some taiko drummers in Brooklyn, New York, where they have a taiko ensemble made up of men and women. I went to Dakar, Senegal, and was invited to play with the Sabar drummers there, after which some of the guys came to New York, where I played with them again. That was a sort of celebration of drums. The taiko group also played there, and at the end, we all played together.
But music is a universal language. If you can speak the language, you can sit down anywhere and make music and other musicians will hear something. And they can join in as well. It’s in the air. There are disciplines and structures and traditions, but you adjust.