In 2017, the album, Hudson, was released by Motema Music. It featured such songs as Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”, Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”, and Robbie Robertson’s “Up on Cripple Creek” played by a quartet: keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Larry Grenadier, guitarist John Scofield, and drummer Jack DeJohnette, who passed away October 26, 2025, in Kingston, NY, at the age of 83.
When I interviewed Scofield last fall (Jersey Jazz, October 2024), he called the group “amazing,” adding that “Jack DeJohnette was one of the giants of the drums. Jack,” he added, “doesn’t want to tour anymore, but I got the tail end of his years. Jack and me, and (keyboardist) Larry Golding made a record for ECM and toured 15 years ago.”
After hearing of DeJohnette’s death, Scofield, on Facebook, described him as, “a good friend and mentor to me. I learned so much about the music in our several endeavors together. He was the best. He will be missed, and we can all be grateful for the recorded history of Jack’s music.”
In a review of Hudson, NPR’s Nate Chinen singled out DeJohnette’s original compositions –“‘Song For World Forgiveness,’ which feels timelier now than it did just a few months ago, and ‘Great Peace Spirit Chant,’ an offering to the Native American peoples that inhabited the Hudson Valley before anybody else.” (All four musicians were Hudson Valley residents).
“Another relevant touchstone, unstated but clearly implied,” Chinen added, “is Miles Davis. His furious late-’60s band was propelled by DeJohnette’s elastic beat, and the soul-jazz swinger ‘Tony Then Jack,’ a Scofield original, alludes to that history. (The “Tony” refers to drummer Tony Williams, whom DeJohnette succeeded in Davis’ band).
In addition to playing in Davis’ band, DeJohnette was in saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s mid-1960s quartet and was a member of the long-lasting acoustic group called The Standards Trio with pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Gary Peacock.
Reviewing the Lloyd Quartet’s 1967 live recording from the Montreux Jazz Festival, DownBeat‘s Dave Cantor singled out “an intense DeJohnette drum solo” on a 27-minute performance of Lloyd’s “Forest Flower.”
Lloyd, in a Facebook post, remembered that, “early in 1966 the quartet with Keith (Jarrett), Jack, and Cecil (McBee) coalesced with a concert at the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore. Our first recording, Dream Weaver, came out in 1966. Jack DeJohnette was a natural, intuitive musician and a great, great drummer. Jack brought his own inner, very personal, purposeful vision to every sound he made.”
The Standards Trio, with Jarrett, Peacock, and DeJohnette, began in1983. In 2008, ECM reissued a three-CD box set entitled Setting Standards: New York Sessions. It contained music from the albums Standards Vol. 1, Standards Vol. 2, and Changes, recorded in 1983. There was also a 2007 release by the trio called My Foolish Heart.
Reviewing My Foolish Heat and the three-disc reissue for AllAboutJazz, John Kelman wrote that, “This is a trio that can swing with the best of them . . For some, the Great American Songbook has been tapped out; but for Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette, it’s still a wellspring of inspiration and a source of spontaneous composition of the most collective kind. The release of Setting Standards and My Foolish Heart within months of each other makes clear that, a quarter century since inception, this trio and its paradoxically specific yet wide-reaching concept has by no means overstayed its welcome.”
DeJohnette was born on August 9, 1942, in Chicago. When he was about five years old, he began taking piano lessons. In high school he sang with a doo-wop group but was attracted to jazz when he heard Vernel Fournier’s drumming on the Ahmad Jamal Trio’s 1958 Argo album, At the Pershing: But Not for Me. He began playing along with recordings by Art Blakey, Max Roach, and other drummers, and, in a 2011 interview with the Smithsonian Institution’s jazz oral history program, he said, “It somehow came natural to me.” He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2012.
Survivors include his wife, Lydia, who also served as his manager; and two daughters, Farah and Minya.-SANFORD JOSEPHSON