Jack DeJohnette

Jack DeJohnette was born (August 9, 1942) and raised in Chicago, Illinois where he studied the piano, playing professionally by the age of 14. He became interested in the drums, changing his allegiance to the kit in his late teens. In 1966 he got the opportunity to move to New York where he became a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet. In the group he worked with pianist Keith Jarrett who would go on to become a great influence in DeJohnette's career. Leaving Charles Lloyd in '68 he moved to the Bill Evans Trio and also worked alongside Stan Getz and Miles Davis. With Davis seeing the potential in the young drummer, he added him to his live band and he even performed on Davis' albums Jack Johnson (1970), Live-Evil (1971) and On the Corner (1972), but they parted ways in '71 as DeJohnette craved musical freedom to work on his own sound. He formed the group Compost in 1972 but their experimental sound failed to attract an audience and the musicians went their separate ways after less than a year. He rejoined Stan Getz briefly before trying several other groups, with varying levels of success, including the Gateway Trio, Directions, New Directions and Special Edition, with the latter being his most successful venture, continuing well into the '90s. In 1990 he joined up with Dave Holland, Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheny to release the album Parallel Realities (1990). The following year he was part of a collaborative effort on Music for the Fifth World inspired by Native American history. As he continued to tour and collaborate throughout the '90s and the '00s, he received a Grammy nomination in 2004 for his work on the live album by Keith Jarrett, The Out-of-Towners (2001). In the latter part of the decade he performed in the Latin Project, the Jack DeJohnette Quartet and the Trio Beyond and founded his own record label Golden Beams Productions, putting out his first release Music in the Key of Om (2005). After receiving the prestigious NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship award in 2012. DeJohnette returned to the studio with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist Matthew Garrison to record In Movement, a brand new album which was released in 2016, followed by Hudson (2017) and a session with Anouar Brahem. On October 26, 2025, Jack DeJohnette died of congestive heart failure at the age of 83.