Surely they were known as the Gayman’s Shepherds?
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Did he go dogging often?
Mary ‘May’ McGee - the woman who won the historic Supreme Court contraception case in 1973 which found married couples had right to make private decisions on family planning
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A great name, all things considered
That was the first thread that was unpicked in the fabric of Church and State in this country.
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Donal O’Neill, founder of the Manhattan salted snacks company, my favourite salted snacks brand, has died at the age of 92.
He proved that a full bag of salted peanuts each night is the key to old age and that’s an example I now live my life by though I do mix things up with dry roasted peanuts and an odd sharing bag of their very tasty pub crisps, which I do not share.
Thank you Donal.
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Strokestown. Snigger
You made that up.
A regular on #marian.
Jack DeJohnette, Jazz drummer.
This thread was tailor made for this post.
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Jack de Johnette insisted he was a jazz musician. Not just a drummer.
Thats exactly what I’d expect a dummer to say.
Indeed
Was he an ECM man?
Gerard Depardieu’s greatest performance.
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Yes
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Jack DeJohnette, giant of jazz drumming who played on Miles Davis’s epoch-making Bitches Brew
‘Jack gave me a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over,’ wrote Davis in his memoir
Gift this article free
Jack DeJohnette in 1985 Credit: Anthony Barboza/Getty Images
30 October 2025 2:25pm GMT
Jack DeJohnette, who has died aged 83, was one of the greatest drummers in modern jazz, working with the likes of Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans; he did his most groundbreaking work with Miles Davis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, drawing on elements of rock, funk and r’n’b to blaze a trail in the genre of jazz fusion. “Jack DeJohnette gave me a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over,” Davis wrote in his memoir.
Jack DeJohnette was born in Chicago on August 9 1942; his father was also Jack, while his mother was Eva, née Wood. He was a musical prodigy, strongly influenced by his uncle, Roy Wood Snr, a DJ who went on to found the National Black Network.
He was sent by his mother aged four or five to study the piano with Antoinette Rich, leader of an all-female symphony orchestra in Chicago; she was struck by his perfect pitch. The kazoo was a favourite instrument early on, and when he was five, young Jack played it on stage with the great bluesman T-Bone Walker, a friend of the family.
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Jack Jnr’s musical education was eclectic: he sang with a doo-wop group in high school, and played rock’n’roll piano inspired by Fats Domino. His life changed course when he heard the Ahmad Jamal Trio’s 1958 album At the Pershing: But Not for Me, with its masterly brush work by Vernel Fournier. A friend had left a drum kit in his family’s basement, and Jack began playing along with jazz records. “It somehow came natural to me,” he recalled.
He went on to work with the way-out-there Sun Ra and his Arkestra, as well as John Coltrane, titan of the saxophone. He moved to New York in the mid-1960s, joining pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Cecil McBee in the Charles Lloyd Quartet, whose rock chops would prove influential on the young drummer.
A recording for the BBC’s Jazz Scene programme made at Ronnie Scott’s in 1969, l-r, Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette Credit: David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images
He also worked with the singer Betty Carter, and with Bill Evans, playing on the 1968 album Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival. That year, he appeared with Evans at Ronnie Scott’s: one appreciative member of the audience was Miles Davis, and the following year DeJohnette found himself replacing his friend Tony Williams in the trumpeter’s band.
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He was the principal drummer on Bitches Brew, Davis’s epoch-making 1970 album that fused jazz, rock and funk in a free-flowing, improvisational tidal wave.
“The recording was a stream of creative musical energy,” DeJohnette recalled. “I’d start something, and if it was OK Miles wouldn’t say anything, and it would continue, then he’d cue each instrument in and get something going. When it would start percolating, Miles would then play a solo over that and then let it roll, let it roll, until he felt it had been exhausted.” The result won universal acclaim, Rolling Stone praising its “beauty, subtlety and sheer magnificence”.
After leaving Davis’s outfit, DeJohnette teamed back up with Keith Jarrett – with whom he had played at the inaugural Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967 – to form the long-running Standards Trio with the bassist Gary Peacock, exploring the Great American Songbook. In 1969 he released his solo debut, The DeJohnette Complex.
Other collaborators included Ravi Coltrane, saxophonist son of John and Alice, the guitarists John Scofield and Bill Frisell, and the relentlessly experimental British sax player John Surman, with whom he recorded The Amazing Adventures of Simon Simon in 1981, on which both men added synthesisers and other keyboards.
DeJohnette in Rotterdam in 1991 Credit: Rob Verhorst/Redferns
His 2012 album Sound Travels featured the acclaimed bassist Esperanza Spalding, and in 2014 they played the Barbican in London alongside saxophonist Joe Lovano and keyboards man Leo Genovese. The Telegraph particularly liked a DeJohnette solo that “lifted the spirits” with its “brusque, peremptory energy”.
DeJohnette continued playing the piano throughout his career, releasing The Jack DeJohnette Piano Album in 1985 and Return in 2016. He won two Grammy Awards, in the New Age category for the meditative Peace Time (2007), on which he played all the instruments, and for the Cuban-influenced Skyline (2021), recorded with the pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and double bassist Ron Carter.
Jack DeJohnette is survived by his wife Lydia, who was also his manager, and their two daughters.
Jack DeJohnette, born August 9 1942, died October 26 2025
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Eugene “Nudie” Hughes
Sr Stan
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RIP to both.
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