This may be more "me too", but I'll try to outline a more complete solution. I mix a lot of software from diverse sources together in my product. I encountered this problem first with NiFi JARs, then more recently with Cassandra JARs all over again. I had already insisted in pom.xml that I have the same version of slf4j everywhere:
<slf4j.version>[1.7.25]</slf4j.version>
...
<dependency>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
<version>${slf4j.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-simple</artifactId>
<version>${slf4j.version}</version>
</dependency>
... (all the slf4j JARs I needed)
Then, I told Maven I wanted Cassandra without whatever it was bringing in for slf4j:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.cassandra</groupId>
<artifactId>cassandra-all</artifactId>
<version>${cassandra.version}</version>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-simple</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</dependency>
However, like you, I was getting complaints from
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.slf4j.helpers.MessageFormatter.arrayFormat(Ljava/lang/String;[Ljava/lang/Object;)Lorg/slf4j/helpers/FormattingTuple;
at ch.qos.logback.classic.spi.LoggingEvent.<init>(LoggingEvent.java:112)
From mvn dependency:tree, I found out that I was getting logback 1.1.3 which wasn't matching what Cassandra was apparently using (0.9-something like you). So, I excluded getting logback too by adding these exclusions to slf4j ones already there:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.cassandra</groupId>
<artifactId>cassandra-all</artifactId>
<version>${cassandra.version}</version>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-simple</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>ch.qos.logback</groupId>
<artifactId>logback-core</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>ch.qos.logback</groupId>
<artifactId>logback-classic</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</dependency>
...whereupon, the problem I had and you are reporting here, went away. I hope this helps someone.