Jack DeJohnette, Towering Jazz Drummer and Bandleader, Dies at 83

As well as his lifelong role in the integration of rock’n’roll and electronics into jazz, DeJohnette applied his spiritual leanings and free playing style to more ambient song forms. He made two albums, 2005’s Music in the Key of Om and the Grammy-winning 2007 LP Peace Time, as accompaniment to the vibrational healing practice of his second wife, Lydia DeJohnette. He saw music as a way to access what he called the Library of Cosmic Ideas. “We’ve been taught a watered-down version of what ‘time and space’ is, that we’re in a three-dimensional reality, which we are not,” he told Best Self Media in a recent interview. “We’re in a multidimensional reality with potentials that may seem remarkable to us—but these potentials are quite normal from an interplanetary or galactic point of view.”

He went on, “I feel like I’m riding a wave, an energetic, creative wave. I feel like I’m being carried by the creative consciousness. I hear Miles in my head sometimes, or I hear Coltrane. I think that corroborates that we never die.… I believe that we are infinite. We go through the process of birth and death, and death is just a mechanism by which the soul departs the physical body. But only a portion of that soul is in this physical body. People talk about life after death and immortality. We are immortal already.”