Jack DeJohnette, One of Jazz’s Great Drummers, Has a Surprise

In the early 1960s, Jack DeJohnette, a pianist from Chicago, took a weeklong gig at the Showboat club in Philadelphia with the saxophonist Eddie Harris and played his second instrument: the drums. (A bandmate had left a set at his house.) At one point, Harris, an older player whose career was starting to gain steam, took DeJohnette aside.

“Eddie said to me, he said, ‘Man, you play nice piano,’” DeJohnette recalled last month, sitting at the kitchen table of the cabin-style home near Woodstock, N.Y., where he and his wife, Lydia, have lived for around 50 years. “‘But something about your drumming — you’re a natural on drums. And you’ve got to decide which one’s going to be your main instrument.’”

To anyone who has followed jazz the past 50-plus years, his eventual choice will be obvious. DeJohnette, now 82, is drumming royalty.

Starting in the mid-60s, he fearlessly tackled the era’s new hybrid sounds, anchoring a quartet led by the saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd that became a surprise crossover success. He then moved on to the game-changing early fusion outfits of Miles Davis, who wrote in his autobiography that DeJohnette “gave me a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over.” Later, he excelled in a wide variety of contexts, including the state-of-the-art traditionalism of Keith Jarrett’s so-called Standards Trio — which endured for more than three decades — and the expansive explorations of the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, summoning hurtling energy or impressionistic calm as needed.

“He is in the pantheon of our greatest drummers,” Lloyd wrote of DeJohnette in an email. “From the first time we played together there was a deep simpatico.” In a phone interview, Jarrett, who also shared time with DeJohnette in Lloyd’s and Davis’s bands, described the drummer’s contributions as “just a natural flow of what needed to be done.”

As his reputation on drums grew, DeJohnette never stopped playing piano, a fact he will underscore at a rare solo concert on Sept. 28 at the Woodstock Playhouse, where he will perform on the instrument. As heard on “Return,” a 2016 vinyl-only LP that was his first unaccompanied piano full-length and featured mostly his own compositions, his style is unhurried and luminous, technically sound but primarily focused on finely honed mood-setting.