Jack DeJohnette's Directions

The Arc of Jack DeJohnette's Directions

The pivots — what forced Jack DeJohnette's Directions to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Cosmic Chicken Foundation

   The shift happened when DeJohnette moved from being a sideman of choice to a bandleader with a chip on his shoulder. Bringing in John Abercrombie and Alex Foster allowed Jack to lean into a funkier, more distorted palette that owed as much to Sly Stone as it did to post-bop. You hear it on the title track of Cosmic Chicken where the drums are pushed right to the front of the mix, forcing the melodic instruments to fight for air. This era was about shedding the traditional jazz skin and finding out how much volume an ECM session could actually handle.

2. 02

   The Untitled Expansion

   By 1976, the band doubled down on the interplay between Abercrombie’s electric guitar and Warren Bernhardt’s keys, creating a more expansive, almost psychedelic atmosphere. The recording of 'Untitled' at Generation Sound Studios stripped away some of the previous record's whimsy in favor of dense, atmospheric improvisation. It was the moment the band realized they didn't need a hook if the groove was suffocating enough. The result was a darker, more cerebral sound that bridged the gap between the basement fusion of the early seventies and the refined European aesthetic that would soon define the label.

Influences

• Miles Davis — Jack was the engine for 'Bitches Brew' and 'Live-Evil,' and Directions is the direct fallout of that session's philosophy. You hear it in the way Jack treats the entire kit as a lead instrument rather than a metronome. He took the 'play what's not there' directive and applied it to a power-trio format.
• Max Roach — DeJohnette has cited Roach's melodic approach to the drums as his primary technical foundation. On 'New Rags,' you can hear those pitched, tuned-drum patterns that Roach perfected during his hard-bop era. It’s the sound of a drummer thinking like a composer.
• Sly & The Family Stone — Jack was vocal about his obsession with the funk coming out of the Bay Area in the early seventies. The pocket on 'Cosmic Chicken' is a direct nod to the heavy, syncopated backbeats of Greg Errico. It’s jazz playing with a rock-and-soul heavyweight's hands.
• Ornette Coleman — The 'harmolodic' theory of collective improvisation is baked into how Directions handles solos. Instead of a standard horn-led structure, the whole band moves as a single unit without a fixed harmonic anchor. It's the Coleman influence filtered through electric distortion.
• John Coltrane — DeJohnette briefly played with Coltrane in 1966 and carried that spiritual intensity into every project he led. The long-form improvisations on 'Untitled' mirror the sheet-of-sound energy Coltrane used to push past the limits of his instrument. It's a saxophone's desperation translated to a drum throne.