Jack DeJohnette, a drummer whose command and versatility made him one of the standout jazz instrumentalists of the past five decades and an indispensable figure in era-defining bands like Charles Lloyd’s mid-1960s quartet, Miles Davis’s electrified group of the late 1960s and early ’70s, and Keith Jarrett’s long-running acoustic trio, died on Sunday in Kingston, N.Y. He was 83.
A family representative, Joan Clancy, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.
Mr. DeJohnette rose to prominence in the second half of the 1960s, when jazz was expanding in multiple directions, absorbing textures from rock, R&B and various international traditions, and embracing fearless abstraction. His approach, which could be hushed or explosive, swinging or fiercely funky, built bridges between the old and the new.
“I’m like a colorist on the drums,” he said in a 2015 video interview, going on to liken himself to a “painter.” “So I can work within time, but I can also be free of it, more elastic in that sense.”
Having started out as a pianist, Mr. DeJohnette also grew into an accomplished bandleader and composer, heading a series of fresh and innovative groups starting in the 1970s, including New Directions and Special Edition.
He first drew attention in 1966 as part of a quartet led by the saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd. Completed by Mr. Jarrett and the bassist Cecil McBee, the group became one of the era’s most popular jazz attractions, touring Europe and playing rock venues like the Fillmore in San Francisco, where they shared the bill with Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
The Lloyd quartet’s sound, featured on popular albums like the 1967 live effort “Forest Flower,” which was based on its performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, encompassed high-energy post-bop, earthy R&B and exploratory improvisation and was among the few jazz recordings of its era to get widespread radio play.
In 2024, Mr. Lloyd told The New York Times that Mr. DeJohnette “is one of the most sensitive drummers.” Mr. DeJohnette, he added, “‘brought it’ then and he has continued to ‘bring it’ to all of the manifestations of his work as a musician — whether it be on drums, piano, or what he is hearing in his mind’s ear as a composer.”
Mr. DeJohnette went on to play with the pianist Bill Evans before being recruited into Mr. Davis’s band in 1969. On “Bitches Brew,” the 1970 album that defined Mr. Davis’s shift into electric fusion, Mr. DeJohnette’s crisp backbeats, played alongside other drummers, anchored the band’s heady, psychedelic sound.
How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. If you know of someone who might be a candidate for a Times obituary, please suggest it here.
Onstage, as in the performances excerpted on Mr. Davis’s 1971 album “Live-Evil,” Mr. DeJohnette dialed up the intensity, combining kinetic drive with a slippery rhythmic wobble, giving the music a volatile energy that drew equally on funk and jazz but didn’t feel quite like either. Mr. DeJohnette, Mr. Davis observed in his memoir, “gave me a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over.”
With his own groups, including New Directions and Special Edition, he demonstrated his evocative writing style and abiding interest in the entirety of the rhythmic continuum of jazz, including free-form texture, hard-edged backbeats and cascading swing.
The trio with Mr. Jarrett and the bassist Gary Peacock made its debut in 1983 with the album “Standards, Vol. 1.”
Avoiding rehearsal and focusing on core repertoire, the group, with Mr. Jarrett as the nominal leader — the original prompt for the band was, as Mr. Jarrett recalled, “What if we were all sidemen?” — dedicated itself to fresh interpretations of the Great American Songbook. It became one of the most beloved live acts in jazz, and a new beacon for the acoustic, small-group approach after a period when electric fusion reigned.
“How have we endured?” Mr. DeJohnette replied when asked on the podcast “The American Radio Show” about the trio’s longevity near the end of its three-decade life span. “I think because we play every piece as if it were new for the first time. Prepare for the unexpected, and go with it.”
Jack DeJohnette Jr. was born on Aug. 9, 1942, in Chicago. The only child of Jack DeJohnette Sr. and Eva Jeanette (Wood) DeJohnette, he grew up on the city’s South Side with his mother and was legally adopted by his maternal grandmother.
At home, he listened to jazz on 78 r.p.m. records as well as to classical broadcasts and “The Grand Ole Opry” on the radio. When he was about 5, he began taking piano lessons, practicing on a spinet that his grandmother had bought from a friend.
Mr. DeJohnette’s uncle Roy Wood Sr., a radio announcer and jazz disc jockey (and the father of the comedian Roy Wood Jr.), encouraged Jack’s interest in music and took him around to clubs. (He often recalled the time when he sat in on kazoo with the blues guitarist T-Bone Walker.)
In high school, he sang with a doo-wop group and, inspired by Fats Domino, played rock ’n’ roll piano. Hearing the pianist Ahmad Jamal’s trio on the 1958 live album “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” he was especially struck by the precise brush work of the drummer Vernel Fournier and his attention turned back toward jazz.
