Jack DeJohnette was born August 9, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois, to Jack DeJohnette Sr. and Eva Jeanette DeJohnette. Raised for a time by his grandmother, he began classical piano study at age four with Antoinette Rich and was performing professionally by fourteen. His uncle, Chicago jazz disc jockey Roy Wood Sr., introduced him to the city's clubs, and by his teens DeJohnette had added drums, taught informally by neighborhood player Bobby Miller Jr., to his piano training. He came up in Chicago's fertile early-1960s scene playing R&B, hard bop, and the emerging avant-garde alongside Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, future pillars of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and occasionally sat in on drums with Sun Ra's Arkestra. He graduated from Chicago Vocational School in 1961 already an established presence on the local circuit.

DeJohnette moved to New York in 1966 and joined saxophonist Charles Lloyd's quartet, a band whose incorporation of rock-derived energy made it one of the biggest crossover successes in mid-1960s jazz; the group's 1966 album Forest Flower sold in numbers rare for a jazz record and carried Lloyd's quartet onto rock-festival stages including the Fillmore. In Lloyd's band DeJohnette met pianist Keith Jarrett, beginning a working relationship that would run for nearly four decades. He left Lloyd in early 1968 and spent the following two years in constant demand, working with Jackie McLean, Abbey Lincoln, and Betty Carter before joining Bill Evans's trio later that year; the group's set at the 1968 Montreux Jazz Festival was issued as Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival. A brief stint with Stan Getz's quartet that November led directly to his first sessions with Miles Davis.

Davis had watched DeJohnette perform at Ronnie Scott's in London in 1968 and, needing a drummer who could carry rock-derived grooves without abandoning jazz's improvisational freedom, brought him into the working band in 1969 in place of Tony Williams. DeJohnette anchored the rhythm section on Bitches Brew (recorded 1969, released 1970, Columbia), the double album that, alongside In a Silent Way, redirected the course of jazz toward fusion; he continued with Davis through 1971, appearing on the Fillmore East and Fillmore West live recordings, Live-Evil, A Tribute to Jack Johnson, and material later gathered on On the Corner and Directions. The Davis band put him alongside John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, and bassist Dave Holland, and it was DeJohnette who drew Keith Jarrett into the group as a second keyboardist.

Through the 1970s DeJohnette built a parallel career as a leader on ECM Records, beginning with his debut The DeJohnette Complex (1969, Milestone) and continuing through Sorcery (1974, Prestige), Gateway and Gateway 2 (1975 and 1978), the ECM trio with Dave Holland and guitarist John Abercrombie that became one of his most enduring associations, and New Directions (1978), with Holland alumnus Eddie Gómez and trumpeter Lester Bowie. In 1979 and 1980 he formed Special Edition, a rotating-horn ensemble built around reedmen David Murray and Arthur Blythe that critics received as a genuine synthesis of avant-garde vocabulary and hard-swinging discipline; the group's debut Special Edition (1980) was named Album of the Year in DownBeat's 1980 critics' poll, and the band continued through Album Album (1984, with Murray, John Purcell, Rufus Reid, and Howard Johnson) and Irresistible Forces (1987, with Greg Osby and Gary Thomas).

DeJohnette, Jarrett, and bassist Gary Peacock had first recorded together on Peacock's 1977 ECM date Tales of Another; in January 1983 Jarrett brought the same trio into the studio under his own name, and the resulting Standards, Vol. 1, Standards, Vol. 2, and Changes launched what became known as the Standards Trio. At a moment when a working band devoted to American-songbook repertoire was considered artistically unfashionable, the trio toured and recorded for more than two decades, through Standards Live (1986), Tokyo '96 (1998), Whisper Not (2000), and The Out-of-Towners (2004), effectively ending only with Jarrett's retirement from touring. DeJohnette received the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2012 and won two Grammy Awards during this later period, Best New Age Album for Peace Time (2009) and, decades after his fusion-era breakthrough, Best Jazz Instrumental Album for Skyline (2021), a piano trio reunion with Ron Carter and Gonzalo Rubalcaba.

DeJohnette remained active into his final decade, releasing the AACM reunion album Made in Chicago (2015, with Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill), the electric quartet record In Movement (2016, with Ravi Coltrane and Matthew Garrison), and Hudson (2017), a quartet with guitarist John Scofield, keyboardist John Medeski, and bassist Larry Grenadier named for the New York valley where all four lived. He died October 26, 2025, of congestive heart failure at a hospital in Kingston, New York, at age 83.

DeJohnette drew on Max Roach, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones, and Tony Williams, but his own playing was distinguished by a pianist's harmonic sense brought to the drum kit: he thought in terms of orchestral color and structure rather than pure time-keeping, an approach one critic described as functioning less as a drummer than as "a percussionist, colourist and epigrammatic commentator" inside the ensemble. That dual foundation, four years of formal piano study preceding his drumming, let him move fluidly between the propulsive, rock-inflected power he brought to Miles Davis's electric bands, the exacting restraint the Standards Trio's songbook repertoire demanded, and the freer, horn-forward writing of his own Special Edition. He periodically returned to the piano itself across his career, recording The Jack DeJohnette Piano Album (1985) and the solo Return (2016), and was widely regarded, in DownBeat's phrase, as one of the era's few genuine "complete musicians" rather than a drummer alone.