Collection: Jack DeJohnette

Jack DeJohnette started on piano at four and didn't take up drums until he was thirteen. He grew up in Chicago, attended Wilson Junior College on the South Side alongside Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, came under the influence of Muhal Richard Abrams as the AACM was forming, and moved to New York in 1966. Charles Lloyd hired him, and it was through Lloyd's quartet that he met Keith Jarrett, a musical partnership that would last the rest of his life. Miles Davis heard him playing with Stan Getz and hired both DeJohnette and Getz's pianist Chick Corea: first for what became known as the Lost Quintet, then for the studio sessions that produced "Bitches Brew." Davis wrote in his autobiography that DeJohnette "gave me a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over." He stayed with Davis through "Jack Johnson," "Live-Evil" and "On the Corner," left in 1971, and spent the rest of the decade working with Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio and European Quartet, recording for ECM as a leader with Directions and New Directions, and building toward "Special Edition" (ECM, 1979), the rotating front-line band that became his primary vehicle for the next three decades, rotating saxophonists including David Murray, Arthur Blythe and Chico Freeman through its lineup. He died at his home in Kingston, New York on October 26, 2025, aged 83.