mick laBriola

Drummer played on Bitches Brew and other landmark recordings, as well as making numerous albums as a bandleader

Jack DeJohnette, the jazz drummer celebrated as one of the genre’s true greats – who worked with stars including Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Charles Lloyd – has died aged 83. A press representative for ECM, the record label that released many of his recordings, confirmed the news, while his personal assistant added that he died from congestive heart failure.

Able to bring dynamic, highly musical playing to open-minded free jazz, R&B-leaning instrumental grooves and everything in between, DeJohnette is perhaps best known as the drummer in Davis’s fusion period, contributing to albums such as Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson and On the Corner. He was also celebrated as a regular sideman and bandleader on elegant, progressive fusion releases from ECM in the 1980s.

DeJohnette was born in Chicago in 1942 and played piano from the age of five or six, as he remembered, continuing the instrument alongside the drums which he picked up in his early teens. “Piano and drums are part of the percussion family,” he later said. “There’s no separation: learning one thing feeds the other.”

He started out singing doo-wop in a vocal group and playing rock’n’roll, but was gradually drawn towards jazz, and from the late 1950s had his own trio. He guested with Sun Ra and his Arkestra, fraternised with the city’s avant-garde names such as Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, and sat in for a waylaid Elvin Jones in John Coltrane’s band when they played in Chicago: “A really great, physical and spiritual experience,” DeJohnette said of the latter gig.