Walkoff Jack

Jack DeJohnette's Directions - Eiderdown III

You can surmise how much I hate writing these, but the deaths are piling up worse than the trash on the streets of Manhattan during a 1970s garbageworkers' strike. So I'm using this week to catch up to them all, beginning with this one, which is as devastating as any.

This backyard pic was taken 48 hours before he passed, which made a lot of folks disbelieve the initial reports the other night. Annual checkups might be in order, as much as I distrust for-profit medicine.

The next morning, it somehow all turned out to be sad but true, and I began the Sound Eulogy Process that's been working way OT of late.

To acknowledge this to represent as big of a loss as the death of any possible living musician is somehow an understatement, something I know I'm well known for the world over.

I almost don't know what to say about him. The breadth of his talents and the meaning of his music to me are so extensive as to be nearly indescribable.

What can you say? Is it even possible, in a human life, to have a more tremendous and as lasting of an impact, across such a wide stylistic spectrum, upon one's chosen field than this one?

He really came to the fore in the mid 1960s, when Charles Lloyd hired him as the drummer in that wild quartet with Keith Jarrett.

The legend has it that prior to then, Herbie Hancock had him in his band as the bass player for several months before he realized, hey wait a minute... this guy is really a drummer that plays the drums with the sensitivity and melodicism of a pianist, and he's a damn good pianist too.

He also played reeds, you know. There's a whole sequence in this concert I am about to share where he goes off on tenor sax and duets with Alex Foster, who is at that moment duetting with himself via a very Brian Eno-esque, Roxy Music 2 H.B. Echoplex effect.

Just in the course of the 2 1/2 hours of this show, he bounces from electric keyboards to drums to piano to horn. I imagine if they'd have gone on longer those nights 50 years ago in SF, he'd have eventually seized the bass as well. And maybe sang, and played guitar with his teeth.

That's the thing though, isn't it? When some cats switch from their primary instrument -- what folks think of them as a player of when they spring to mind -- you hear the downgrade in expressive possibilities immediately. If you don't agree, try Ornette on violin sometime. Not that I don't adore Ornette on anything, but you hear the difference from alto to that.

With today's dearly departed deity -- whom most people think of as one of the best drummers ever to grip sticks -- that switch from axe to axe was always a transition from strength to strength.

He's gone now, having passed on suddenly two days ago at 83. Gone, but for the irrevocable fact that the things he did whilst upright and aboveground are so immortal, they couldn't even build a statue to Jack DeJohnette, because such an obsidian edifice would be too static and lifeless to capture the diverse, ever-in-motion life essence of the man.

Jack DeJohnette's Directions

Great American Music Hall

San Francisco, California USA

10.10+11.1975

01 One for Devadip and the Professor

02 Cosmic Chicken/drum solo

03 The Vikings Are Coming

04 Memories/Eiderdown I

05 Eiderdown II

06 Untitled/drum solo

07 Memories II

08 Malibu Reggae

09 Eiderdown III

Total time: 2:31:57

disc break goes after Track 04

Tracks 01-04 & 9: 10.10.1975

Tracks 05-08: 10.11.1975

Jack DeJohnette - drums, keyboards & tenor saxophone 

John Abercrombie - guitar 

Alex Foster - alto & tenor saxophones

Mike Richmond - bass

256/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault

spectral analysis is lossless past the 16 kHz FM cutoff

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited & remastered by EN, October 2025
883 MB FLAC/direct link

So there's 151 minutes of evidence I dragged off Bill's Boots, a minimal fragment to slightly substantiate the deserved superlatives if you don't believe what I just typed. It sounded kinda flat as a pancake sonically, but once I put it in the dishwasher for 12 hours it got clean enough to eat off.

I'll be back sooner than I wanna be, but as long as music figures the inapproachable, toppermost caliber of Jack DeJohnette are gonna keep up and dying, I guess it's gonna be up to people like me to make sure the things they left behind are in the best shape they can be. This, as part of my Cultural Heritage Immortality Program, a necessary innovation when the CHIPs are down like they are.

So ten trillion Thank Yous, of course, to Jack DeJohnette for a lifetime of transcendent and peerless beauty, ongoing since I first heard Miles' Live-Evil -- what JDJ and Airto Moreira get into on that platter basically recalibrates human DNA permanently after 90 seconds of the first track -- and asked "What is this music?!?"--J.

8.9.1942 - 10.26.2025