Master to lead Coltrane tribute
Jack DeJohnette doesn’t mind looking backward, but at 75 years old, he’s busy blazing new musical directions.
As a drummer, composer and pianist, the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master has been in the vanguard of jazz and improvised music for more than half a century, a journey that received a turbo-charged boost when the Charles Lloyd Quartet played an epochal set at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival. Documented on the hit album “Forest Flower,” the group’s performance ushered extended jazz improvisation onto FM radio and put the band into heavy rotation at the Fillmore in San Francisco, where Bill Graham presented the quartet on the same bill with Summer of Love mainstays like the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company.
DeJohnette has been a constant presence in the Bay Area ever since, particularly in the beloved trio led by pianist Keith Jarrett, his former bandmate in Lloyd’s quartet. Now he returns to the Bay Area for what’s essentially a family reunion at the SFJazz Center on Sunday, Sept. 24, with bassist Matthew Garrison and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane as part
of a concert series paying tribute to sax legend John Coltrane. The trio released a Grammy Award-nominated album, “In Movement,” last year.
Ravi is the son of John and Alice Coltrane, and Matthew is the son of bassist Jimmy Garrison, who anchored John Coltrane’s era-defining 1960s quartet with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones. DeJohnette had those relationships in mind when he invited the two young scions to join him in a 1993 tribute to John Coltrane at the Brooklyn Museum.
He knew both of the men as infants, “and, in fact, I played with both of their fathers and Ravi’s mom, too, so there was a musical and family connection there right from the start,” DeJohnette says.
The bonds between DeJohnette and the younger Garrison runs particularly deep. Growing up in Italy after his father’s death at the age of 42 in 1976, Garrison was heading for trouble as a teenager, uninterested in high school and generally feeling alienated. At the urging of his mother, Garrison went to live with the DeJohnette family at their home in Woodstock, N.Y.
“Once I was there, he started giving me information about what my father had done, about Coltrane and Miles, and turning me on to records,” Garrison says. “I had been playing bass since about 15, but I was more interested in breakdancing and soccer. The whole jazz thing came to me when I moved in with Jack.”
Born and raised in Chicago, DeJohnette was something of a prodigy on the piano, an instrument that continues to play an essential role in his creative process. He came of age in the midst of the ferment of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the radical African American arts collective that gave birth to the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
After his career-making run with Charles Lloyd, he put in a six-month stint with piano great Bill Evans and bassist Eddie Gomez in 1968, a a period fleshed out on two recent Resonance Records releases, 2016’s studio album “Some Other Time” and 2017’s “Another Time: The Hilversum Concert.”
“I think the Hilversum is much better,” DeJohnette admits. “Bill played so great, and he was consistent in the way he orchestrated those compositions. The role Eddie and I had was to make them sound fresh every time. That was the fun and the challenge of playing with that trio.”
In 1969, he joined Evans’ former employer, Miles Davis, stepping into the giant shoes of Tony Williams just as the trumpeter’s band evolved toward the aggressively spare electric sound of the 1970 fusion album “Bitches Brew.” Along with Williams, DeJohnette shattered the persistent stereotype of drummers as rhythm savants uninterested or incapable of adding melodic and harmonic content. With his extensive pianistic training, he tuned his drums and approached the kit as an instrument with an orchestral range of tones and colors.
“Everything comes from the piano,” DeJohnette says. “I’m always playing and practicing and writing. It’s a big influence on a lot of what I do. Piano, vibes, marimba, guitar and drums are all part of the percussion family — people forget that. Drums are also a harmonic and melodic instrument, if you’re so inclined.”
He’s usually sitting at the piano at the start of performances with Hudson, the allstar quartet with guitarist John Scofield, keyboardist John Medeski and bassist Larry Grenadier that is scheduled to play UC Davis’ Mondavi Center on Oct. 21 and the Green Music Center in Sonoma on Oct. 22.
For the Peninsula-raised Grenadier, a Hudson Valley neighbor of Dejohnette’s who first heard the drummer play as a teenager at the old Yoshi’s on Claremont Avenue, “he’s the standard by which every other modern drummer is judged.”