Most musicologists agree that the piano is a percussive
instrument as well as a melodic and harmonic instrument. Based on this widely
accepted premise, the piano and the drum come from the same place.
NEA Jazz Master recipient and legendary jazz drummer Jack
DeJohnette knows this as well as any musicologist, and probably better. For
more than five decades, DeJohnette has been the rhythmic anchor behind some of
the most innovative and groundbreaking jazz ever captured in the studio or
created on stage. Along the way, he has collaborated with legends: Miles Davis,
John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny and many others.
But even before he was a drummer, DeJohnette was a pianist.
He took his first musical steps on piano as a child before switching to drums,
but colleagues and fans who know him best also know him as a brilliant piano
composer whose keyboard work has been featured on various recordings over the
course of his career.
Jack DeJohnette the pianist steps into the spotlight alone
in the spring of 2016 with the release of Return, the very first solo piano
recording of his long and distinguished career. Scheduled for a vinyl-only
release in April of 2016, on Newvelle Records, Return features two brand new
compositions as well as reinterpretations of compositions recorded with earlier
bands and projects.
“We are incredibly excited to be releasing this unique and
sublime venture of Jack DeJohnette’s and can’t wait to share it with the
world,” says Elan Mehler of Newvelle.
“Recording a solo piano project is a very challenging,
because it’s just you,” DeJohnette says. “So I really had to think about the
repertoire – what I would record, what would make sense. I wrote two new
pieces, and I also played some of my earlier works that I had recorded
previously with various ensembles. It was a challenge for me – and an exciting
one – to play my own music in a new way. I didn’t want to be in competition
with other musicians. I just wanted to make a statement with this record.”
Whatever the connection between drums and piano –
percussion, melody, rhythm, harmony or all of the above – DeJohnette admits
that he didn’t think about it too much when he went into the studio to lay down
tracks in the making of Return. “I was just going for a mood, a feeling,” he
says. “I didn’t try to intellectualize anything. I just wanted to take the
music to a different space and let the spirit take me – and take the listener –
wherever it wanted to go. It’s a collaboration of mind, body, soul and spirit. It’s
a return to something basic and universal and beautiful.”
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