Drums and Piano | 1942-2025

Jack DeJohnette was born in Chicago on August 9, 1942, started on piano at four and drums at thirteen, attended Wilson Junior College on the South Side alongside Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, and came under the influence of Muhal Richard Abrams and the emerging AACM before moving to New York in 1966. Charles Lloyd's quartet gave him his first major platform and his first sustained connection with pianist Keith Jarrett. Miles Davis heard him behind Stan Getz in 1968 and hired both DeJohnette and Getz's pianist Chick Corea, first for a live touring group and then for the studio recordings that produced "Bitches Brew" (Columbia, 1970). Davis wrote in his autobiography that DeJohnette gave him "a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over." He contributed to "Live-Evil," "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" and "On the Corner" before leaving the Davis group in 1971. His ECM discography as a leader, beginning with "Untitled" (1976), continued through the Directions and New Directions bands before "Special Edition" (1979), with bassist Peter Warren and saxophonists David Murray and Arthur Blythe, established his most enduring leadership format: a rotating front line of younger players built around his own drums and compositional direction. The Standards Trio with Keith Jarrett and Gary Peacock ran in parallel for decades. DeJohnette died at his home in Kingston, New York on October 26, 2025, aged 83.