Home » Jazz Articles » Live Review » Jack DeJohnette and John Surman at the Seattle Art Museum

147

Jack DeJohnette and John Surman at the Seattle Art Museum

By

View read count
Jack DeJohnette and John Surman
Earshot Jazz Festival
Seattle Art Museum
October 26, 2002

The evening began with a kind of mood piece. With a background of ambient sound programmed into a sequencer and English reeds player John Surman complementing with bass clarinet, Jack DeJohnette read poetry by Walt Whitman, poetry that gave the listener a sense of awareness of the environment. Following his reading, DeJohnette then seated himself behind his drum set and triggered a pan-African rhythm from his midi percussion kit then proceeded to lay into the pocket with a backbeat. Surman improvised at first on his bass clarinet then later switched to saxophone playing intense, intricate runs often outside of the musical structure with DeJohnette complementing him. After thirty minutes or so, this first piece ended with the two musicians gradually easing back and allowing the ambient background music to once again become more prominent. The first set ended with a performance of "After The Rain" by John Coltrane with DeJohnette playing piano demonstrating that he is as skilled a pianist as he is a drummer.
Throughout the evening DeJohnette and Surman improvised at times playing with full musical intensity and other times playing more ambient musical passages. Surman alternated between bass clarinet, soprano, tenor and bass saxophone, and, in the final piece, midi stick in which DeJohnette also played midi percussion pads with his hands utilizing programmed sounds imitating djembes, congas, and tablas. Surman consistently pushed the limits of the musical structure with the two musicians at times approaching avante-garde territory, while DeJohnette played with a fiery intensity that was reminiscent of the "Lost Quintet" of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew era. As intricate and outside as Surman's playing was, DeJohnette's playing that night could have been compared with his playing on Miles's Fillmore albums of 1970.

Tags

Comments


PREVIOUS / NEXT




Support All About Jazz

Get the Jazz Near You newsletter All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

Go Ad Free!

To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.

Near

Seattle Concerts

More

Jazz article: Bark Culture At Solar Myth
Jazz article: Hingetown Jazz Festival 2025
Jazz article: Hayley Kavanagh Quartet At Scott's Jazz Club

Popular

Read Take Five with Pianist Irving Flores
Read Jazz em Agosto 2025
Read Bob Schlesinger at Dazzle
Read SFJAZZ Spring Concerts
Read Sunday Best: A Netflix Documentary
Read Vivian Buczek at Ladies' Jazz Festival

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.

Install All About Jazz

iOS Instructions:

To install this app, follow these steps:

All About Jazz would like to send you notifications

Notifications include timely alerts to content of interest, such as articles, reviews, new features, and more. These can be configured in Settings.