Jack DeJohnette, a jazz icon who made his home in Woodstock for half a century and became one of the Hudson Valley’s most visible musical citizens, died Sunday, October 26, 2025 at Kingston Hospital. He was 83. The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.
A Chicago native with a background in classical piano who rose to worldwide renown as a drummer with Miles Davis and the Keith Jarrett Standards Trio, DeJohnette was an outsized musical presence in Ulster County — fundraising on local stages, mentoring new generations of musicians, and treating Woodstock as both workshop and home.
DeJohnette first came to prominence in the late 1960s, drumming on Davis’s breakthrough fusion sessions and quickly becoming after his work with the Charles Lloyd Quartet a first-call collaborator for improvisers of every stripe. According to his biographical material, he collaborated not only with Davis and Jarrett but also with John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Eddie Harris, Herbie Hancock, Betty Carter and others.
His path into Woodstock intersected with one of the area’s great cultural experiments: the Creative Music Studio founded by Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso in the early 1970s at the former Oehler’s Mountain Lodge in West Hurley. DeJohnette was among the notable guests who braided avant-garde exploration into the region’s musical DNA. Though radically different in style and ultimate success, CMS played the same role as magnet for jazz music in the Woodstock area as Bearsville Studios did for rock music.
Around that time, Jack played at CMS in duos and trios with Saugerties resident and bass player Dave Holland at New Year’s Eve events for several years running. For many who didn’t attend jazz performances in New York City, these concerts were unforgettable – musical masters in close conversation
By 1975 Jack and his wife Lydia chose the Catskills for permanence, building a spacious log house in the Woodstock hamlet of Willow and installing a studio that became the beating heart of his creative routine. Friends and visitors recalled the duality of that home base: the deck for conversation and mountain views, and the downstairs workspace where DeJohnette sculpted the multidirectional sound that made him a touchstone to several generations. He was a winner of two Grammy awards (for Peace Time in 2009 and Skyline in 2022) and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master fellowship,
If jazz history defined DeJohnette’s international stature, Woodstock defined his daily practice. He was a fixture at many of the town’s cultural institutions. The rhythm of local life often included a DeJohnette benefit or seasonal concert: a Saturday night to support Family of Woodstock, a summer headline turn at the Drum Boogie Festival, a piano recital at Byrdcliffe reminding audiences that his lyricism began at the keyboard before he took drum throne. In 2016, a Hudson Valley One preview described his Byrdcliffe appearance as both routine and remarkable — routine because he was neighborly and present, remarkable because the same neighbor happened to be “one of the three or four most employed and most influential drummers in the history of modern jazz.”
In his later decades, DeJohnette struck up a Woodstock friendship with Levon Helm, drummer for The Band, attending many of the latter’s Midnight Ramble house concerts and sitting in on some of them.
In 2011, the Jazzstock collective launched with a sold-out Bearsville Theater celebration of DeJohnette’s 70th birthday. The Saugerties producer Danny Melnick remembers booking DeJohnette on the latter’s 75th birthday at the Newport Jazz Festival. When DeJohnette turned 80 in 2022, Bardavon presented him and his work as part of a series.
DeJohnette’s Woodstock years were not a retreat from the world but a re-centering within a community that shared his sense of music as service. That ethic was visible in January 2017 when DeJohnette booked the Kleinert for “A Concert for Inner Peace,” a fundraising performance explicitly framed as spiritual work with civic intent. It surfaced again and again in free public gatherings like Drum Boogie, the biennial percussion party where DeJohnette reliably anchored the day.
“Jack talked a lot about peace, about togetherness, about community, about unity,” Melnick told The Overlook this Monday. “Jack was a very funny, very low-key, soft-spoken guy. But in conversation with you, he really focused on peace. He was very spiritual. It was really all about being together, whether on the bandstand or in the community …. We’ve lost a beacon.”
The region honored him in kind. When Woodstock began informally bestowing symbolic “keys to the town” on artists who helped define its identity, DeJohnette’s name joined a short roll of luminaries whose careers were inseparable from the local arts ecosystem.
Public work had private roots at home. Neighbors saw DeJohnette as a steady presence. He was described as soft-spoken offstage, welcoming and inclined to pitch in.
Jack DeJohnette is survived by his wife Lydia and daughters Farah and Minya. Plans for a local memorial have not yet been announced.
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