I learned today that the music world has just lost two of its greatest: bass guitarist Anthony Jackson, and drummer Jack DeJohnette. I found out about Anthony first, and then about Jack when I wrote to my dear friend Steve Khan to express my sorrow about Anthony. Both were truly towering figures. I was fortunate to have known both of them well, and to have worked with them both many, many times over the years.
Of the two, I was closer to Anthony; we worked on dozens of records together. He was a fiercely intelligent man, and a musician of the highest professional caliber. (He was so much more than just a musician — he was a thinker, a philosopher, a polymath. He was what, in Dr. Johnson’s day, was called “a man of parts” — the highest compliment a gentleman of roving talents and interests, and unquenchable curiosity, could be paid.) He could be prickly and stubborn, and he was a perfectionist in the studio (which can get tense at times) — but nobody else could do what he did, or thought about the role of the bass in the way he did. Indeed, if he were here he would chide me for saying he played the “bass”: starting in the early 80s he developed a six-stringed instrument that he called a “contrabass guitar”, and he played only that from the latter half of that decade until the end of his career (a career tragically cut short at 73 by health problems that dogged him all his adult life). The instruments he played were beautiful objects in themselves, made by the luthier Vinny Fodera — great slabs of lustrous wood with only one pickup, and no controls except for an on-off switch. Anthony’s tone, his sense of rhythm and harmony, and the breadth and depth he brought to every project were utterly unique.
I was always thrilled to hear that Anthony would be playing on any project I was hired for. He adorned every record he ever played on, and I will always cherish the time we spent together in all those studios — especially all the records we made with Steve Khan, where Anthony was always given total freedom to let his vision soar. (Here’s an example: Blue Zone 41, which we recorded at Skyline Studios, NY, in 1987. The players are Steve Khan on guitar, Dave Weckl on drums, Manolo Badrena on percussion (which, in Manolo’s case, means a lot more than what you might ordinarily think of as “percussion”), and AJ on Fodera contrabass guitar, and that scream at the end.)
What can I say about Jack DeJohnette? I’d been a fan since I first heard Bitches’ Brew, and being able, starting a decade or so later, to work with him often in the studio was for me a dream come true. Nobody played like him — he made the kit sing and dance and whisper and shout, and he was always a gentleman. He was everywhere at the forefront of jazz for six decades, and his discography includes many of the finest recordings ever made (in particular I love the trio work he did with Keith Jarrett and Gary Peacock, for which I was fortunate enough to have been an assistant engineer early in my career).
You can read Steve Khan’s tributes to these titans at his website, here.
Rest in peace, Anthony and Jack. Thank you. Thank you.