Star drummers gather for Jack DeJohnette birthday benefit concert

Bill Frisell, Dave Holland, Joe Lovano, Ravi Coltrane, John Scofield, Bruce Hornsby, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Billy Hart, Jason Moran, Chris Potter, esperanza spalding and Terri Lyne Carrington will gather at the Ulster Performing Arts Center in Kingston for a Jack DeJohnette birthday benefit on Aug. 9 at 5 p.m. The concert, titled Celebrating Jack DeJohnette: Sound Travels, will take place on the drummer’s birth date at UPAC, 601 Broadway, and it is built less like a memorial than a live demonstration of how far his playing still reaches.

The event will benefit Family of Woodstock and The Table at Woodstock, two organizations rooted in the Hudson Valley’s social safety net. Family of Woodstock provides shelters, emergency food pantries, domestic violence services, court advocates, counseling, case management, hotlines and child care supports. The Table at Woodstock began with food security and advocacy work and now says its mission serves the Onteora community. Tickets will go first to UPAC and Bardavon members on Wednesday at 10 a.m., then to the public on Friday at 10 a.m.

The roster says as much about DeJohnette’s legacy as any formal tribute could. His career moved from straight-ahead jazz to fusion, improvisation and bandleading without ever flattening into one lane, and the players on this bill reflect that spread. Frisell and Scofield point toward guitar-led modern jazz that leans on color and space. Holland, Lovano, Coltrane, Potter and Moran bring the language of open-ended, post-bop conversation. Mitchell and Smith reach back to the AACM and free improvisation, while spalding and Hornsby widen the frame beyond a single jazz generation. Carrington and Hart place his influence directly in the drum chair, where DeJohnette’s approach still shows up as both timekeeping and conversation.

The National Endowment for the Arts named DeJohnette a 2012 NEA Jazz Master and called that fellowship the federal government’s highest honor for jazz artists. The agency also noted that he played with virtually every major jazz figure from the 1960s on, including Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and Abbey Lincoln, and that he studied classical piano for 10 years before taking up drums. That piano background helps explain why his drumming and composing so often sounded harmonically open, a quality modern players still chase in their own bands.

DeJohnette died on Oct. 26, 2025, at age 83, in Kingston Hospital, surrounded by his wife, family and close friends. Less than a year later, Kingston will turn his birthday into a gathering of drummers, composers and improvisers, and the lineup at UPAC will make the lesson plain: his influence is still being played in real time.