From Miles Davis to the Avant-Garde: Inside Mark O'Leary’s Sonic Journeys with Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, and the Electric Miles Spirit

 There is a specific, electrifying frequency in creative music that can only be touched when standing next to the pioneers who invented it. For Irish guitarist and composer Mark O’Leary, this became a lived reality through his extensive live collaborations with legendary drummers Jack DeJohnette and Billy Hart—two central architects of Miles Davis’s most radical, shape-shifting electric eras.

Performing with musicians who propelled the rhythm sections of masterpieces like Bitches Brew, On the Corner, Big Fun, and A Tribute to Jack Johnson, O’Leary didn't just inherit jazz history; he actively recontextualized it on the bandstand.

"Oozing the Paradigm": The Limerick Sessions

During a memorable concert series, O’Leary performed in a trio alongside visionary trumpeter Tomasz Stańko and drummer Billy Hart. The musical chemistry was instantaneous, marked by an open, unfolding landscape where the historic DNA of Miles’s electric band immediately surfaced.

Reflecting on Hart's commanding presence, O’Leary recalls:

"Billy Hart would just lay down grooves arbitrarily, myself and Tomasz knew these grooves were predicated upon On the Corner, Billy was in that band, and was oozing the paradigm, a vivifying infusion into the music, myself and Tomasz were exhilarated and reciprocated, it was awesome!"

Standing on stage before a captivated audience, the connection between the musicians was absolute.

"The music would open up," O'Leary explains. "Billy Hart was laying down these grooves and myself and Tomasz Stanko would look at each other and were in congruence, this is On the Corner man and this is the closest we're going to get to Miles."

Turning on a Dime with Jack DeJohnette

This raw, electric energy extended into an intimate duo setting with Jack DeJohnette, who performed on drums, percussion, and synthesizers. Beyond their staggering musical compatibility, DeJohnette became a close confidant. "Jack was a great friend and mentor of Mark," O'Leary notes.

The duo's performances were a masterclass in spontaneous composition, utilizing a vast vocabulary of funk, rock, jazz, and world music elements juxtaposed against sharp riffs, vamps, and modal structures—the very elements emblematic of the Big Fun aesthetic, Then the music would metastasize into textures emanating  from Bitches Brew songbook. 

The transition from abstraction to deep groove could happen in a split second. As O’Leary remembers:

"When I played in duo with Jack DeJohnette, Jack would stop and turn on a dime and say 'Mark, let's play some funky stuff!' The 'funky stuff' were grooves that emanated straight out of On the Corner, Jack DeJohnette was in Miles band for On the Corner."

Crossroads at Birdland: A Lesson in Lineage

This deep connection to the lineage of the music was a recurring theme in O’Leary’s collaborations with avant-garde masters. During their own duo concerts together, the legendary pianist Paul Bley shared a striking historical anecdote with O’Leary that perfectly illustrated the definitive crossroads jazz musicians often face.

Years earlier, a young Paul Bley and Herbie Hancock were told to come down to the iconic New York jazz club Birdland. Unexpectedly, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis walked through the doors. Bley and Hancock were presented with a monumental, instantaneous choice. Given the opportunity to choose their path, Hancock went one way, while Bley ultimately chose to play with Sonny Rollins. It was a pivotal moment of artistic alignment—one that echoed through Bley’s fiercely independent career and resonated deeply with O'Leary's own uncompromising, improvisational journey.

The Van Sessions: From Bill Laswell to Derek Bailey

The music created by O'Leary and DeJohnette was heavily influenced by what was happening off the stage. Between gigs, the artists would spend hours in the tour van listening to Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa remixes of Miles Davis's electric period. Laswell’s dub-heavy, ambient, and spatial reconstruction of that catalog completely altered their headspace, directly influencing the sonic architecture of their live concerts.

Their nightly sets became a sprawling canvas that blurred the lines between heavy, rhythmic post-Miles material—such as Big Fun, Bitches Brew, and Jack Johnson—and entirely free, abstract improvisation. The band would pivot effortlessly from dense, driving funk to sparse, pointillistic textures akin to Derek Bailey, or the spacious, ECM-style atmospheric worlds found on records like John Abercrombie’s Timeless. 

 Closing the Loop: Ellipses and the Theme from Jack Johnson

That electric Miles DNA never truly left Mark O'Leary once it was introduced to him. Years later, this foundational influence resurfaced during the exploration of driving, rock-jazz propulsions on the album Ellipses on FMR Records.

To capture that specific, heavy-hitting groove ethos, a powerhouse trio was assembled. It featured John Herndon, the rhythmic heartbeat of post-rock pioneers Tortoise, on drums, alongside Ståle Storløkken, the avant-garde keyboard maestro from Supersilent with Mark O'Leary on Guitar and electronics.

Bringing Herndon’s metronomic-yet-fluid post-rock jazz precision together with Storløkken’s expansive, cosmic synth layers felt like the modern evolution of the groundbreaking work done by Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Michael Henderson in 1970 in juxtaposition to O'Leary's highly original pointillistic guitar lines, an panegyric to the electric/post Miles legacy.

Mark O'Leary guitar, Jack DeJohnette electric Miles Davis, Billy Hart On the Corner, Paul Bley Sonny Rollins Birdland, avant-garde jazz improvisation, Ellipses FMR records.Big Fun, Bitches Brew.