Birthdays, birthdays: record companies, and promoters love to wheel out the special commemorations and events when there’s a good round number. Jack DeJohnette is 71 today, and many happy returns. So let’s hear it for birthdays with odd numbers as well and look back on the great drummer's year musically speaking.

Since his 70th there has been loads going on. Towards the end of last year Sound Travels (E One Music) was released, one of DeJohnette’s best albums in years, a Robert Sadin-produced affair with the band’s size swelling and contracting to suit Jack’s arrangements. ‘Dirty Ground’ with a vocal from Bruce Hornsby was the most accessible, with a “New Orleans-meets-The Band" vibe, and a great down home shuffle from Jack who co-wrote the song with the man DeJohnette in the notes refers to as ‘The Bruce’. Rolling Stones saxophonist Tim Ries addded great soprano sax on the song, and the George Benson and Franco-inspired guitarist Lionel Loueke showed his range with some funky licks on a tune the lyric of which points to the need in New Orleans or anywhere for that matter not to give up or for that matter give in. There was even a lovely spot from Bobby McFerrin on ‘Oneness’ written for Gateway, a band DeJohnette actually reconvened for a one-off gig in his home town of Chicago.

Sound Travels was only one part of what DeJohnette has been involved with over the past year and ECM slipped out towards the end of last year a beautiful four-CD box set Special Edition, which collected the output of  DeJohnette’s band of the same name between 1979 and 1984 spread over four albums Special Edition, Tin Can Alley, Inflation Blues, and Album Album. Fine, nuanced, spirited, free form and original in terms of writing and performance, you’ll hear highlights in this set that include David Murray brilliantly wild and fresh on the two albums he’s featured on, and Chico Freeman’s characterful bluesiness on such marvellously raucous numbers as ‘I Know’ on Tin Can Alley where the music opens up and ‘out’ becomes ‘in’. And most recently this year in terms of releases (and also live appearances in Europe) Jack DeJohnette as a member of the Keith Jarrett Standards trio featured on Somewhere, the ESP of the trio palpable as ever, De Johnette’s role here, and in jazz internationally, as significant and topical as ever.

Jack DeJohnette appears at the Drum Boogie festival in Woodstock, New York state, on 7 September www.drumboogiefestival.com