For Jack DeJohnette, A Chicago Homecoming Brought A Reunion With Old Friends

Jack DeJohnette (center) called in fellow Chicago musicians (from left) Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Larry Gray and Muhal Richard Abrams to play on his new live album, Made In Chicago. Photo:Paul Natkin/Courtesy of the artist

NPR Music
MAY 30, 2015 7:43 AM ET
Drummer Jack DeJohnette is an NEA Jazz Master who's played with everybody. He helped Miles Davis invent jazz-rock in the 1960s and '70s, and he's been the anchor in Keith Jarrett's trio for decades. But DeJohnette's latest album, Made in Chicago, takes the 71-year-old drummer back to his old stomping grounds and reunites him with some of the musicians he played with in Chicago growing up.


DeJohnette currently lives outside Woodstock, N.Y., but in 2013, the Chicago Jazz Festival invited him back to his hometown to headline Jack DeJohnette Day — and he knew just who he wanted to play with him.

"I didn't have to think," DeJohnette says. "I immediately, these are the people who came up. This is an opportunity to do this ... celebrate with my friends, who are great legends in their own right."

One of the musicians joining DeJohnette onstage at the Chicago Jazz Festival was pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. 

"We all were on the scene," Abrams says. "And we all played a lot with each other. That's just the way it was in Chicago. We used to get together to play in an original manner. That included Jack and a whole host of people."


Among those people were woodwind players Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill — boundary-pushing composers, improvisers and leaders of their own ensembles — who also joined DeJohnette for the 2013 reunion. The drummer first played with them in basements, attics and neighborhood clubs when he was a teenager in the early 1960s.

read more: http://www.npr.org/2015/05/30/410547085/for-jack-dejohnette-a-chicago-homecoming-brought-a-reunion-with-old-friends