Jack DeJohnette, the jazz drummer, pianist, and bandleader who played on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and worked closely with Sonny Rollins, Keith Jarrett, and many other jazz luminaries, has died. His longtime label ECM Records confirmed the news, and his personal assistant told The Guardian the cause of death was congestive heart failure. DeJohnette was 83 years old.
Born in Chicago, in 1942, DeJohnette grew up in a mostly segregated neighborhood, raised primarily by his grandmother and poet mother. From the age of five or six, he studied traditional piano with a neighborhood teacher; back home, his uncle was filling the house with jazz records by the likes of Duke Ellington and Billie Holliday. When that uncle, Roy Wood, became the first Black news announcer on a white Chicago radio station, DeJohnette gained access to an endless supply of jazz records that fueled an early infatuation with the genre. In a newly integrated high school at the dawn of rock’n’roll, he sang doo-wop and played in dance bands—occasionally on acoustic bass—formed by students exposed to a network of legendary Chicago jazz and blues labels like Chess and Vee Jay.
When a drummer friend left his kit in DeJohnette’s basement, he took up playing along to his uncle’s Max Roach, Clifford Brown, and Charlie Parker records and discovered he was a natural. Kicked out of high school for skipping class, he took up serious music study and played with a local quintet specializing in Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey arrangements. When his grandmother died, he bought a car, a drum set, and a Wurlitzer electric piano and hustled solo keyboard gigs at Chicago bars, practicing in the daytime for three hours apiece on the drums and piano.
His growing curiosity and expertise brought him into the orbit of Chicago’s avant-garde scene. After watching Sun Ra and His Arkestra rehearse at a nearby tavern, DeJohnette was invited into the fold and played drums for the outfit in an ad-hoc arrangement that continued into the 1960s as his status grew. Sun Ra and a new generation of jazz masters—particularly Miles Davis and John Coltrane—were coming into their own as composers, and DeJohnette would catch their shows at local club McKee Fitcher’s. “I’d go almost every night to hear Coltrane,” he told the Smithsonian in 2011, “and it was… what can I say? It was the most amazing experience of hearing music.” One night, when Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones was late for a set, the club owner yelled at Coltrane to “Let Jack DeJohnette play.” He joined the band for three songs—“a great physical and spiritual experience,” DeJohnette said. “John was like a train. He was like a magnet and you felt this pull.”