Al Foster, drummer for Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, has died : NPR

Al Foster, whose beautifully alert and versatile drumming fashioned a swirling present in trendy jazz for greater than 60 years, propelling bands led by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and plenty of others, died on Wednesday in his New York City condominium. He was 82.

Bonnie Rose Steinberg, his accomplice of greater than 47 years, confirmed his loss of life to NPR Music. She stated Foster died from a critical sickness.

Foster had a robust but supple beat, and the intuitive potential to shift his rhythmic stability to swimsuit the musical setting. His swinging experience cymbal may convey the crisp authority of bebop or the deep pull of modal jazz, and he offered the beating backbeat in some outstanding fusion bands.

“He knocked me out because he had such a groove and he would just lay it right in there,” Davis wrote in Miles: The Autobiography. The trumpeter honored that bedrock groove with a hallucinatory funk composition titled “Mr. Foster,” recorded throughout the periods for his 1972 album On the Corner. Joining Davis’ working band, Foster appeared on studio albums like Big Fun and reside albums like Dark Magus and Agharta. 

But Foster most popular to swing, and he did so mightily in a spread of notable settings. He labored on and off with Rollins, certainly one of his musical heroes, for a number of many years. Foster additionally seems on a defining double album by one other tenor saxophonist, Joe Henderson, The State of the Tenor, Vols. 1 & 2, recorded at The Village Vanguard in 1985.

The bassist on that recording, Ron Carter, additionally labored alongside Foster in teams led by alto saxophonist Art Pepper and pianists McCoy Tyner and Horace Silver, amongst others. In 1978, Foster’s sterling repute in straight-ahead jazz circles was made manifest in a record-label supergroup branded the Milestones Jazzstars, which toured extensively and launched a reside album.

Foster made his debut as a frontrunner that very same yr: the funk-flexing Mixed Roots, on CBS Records. But he was sparse together with his solo releases within the ensuing years, turning a nook in 2003 with Oh! — credited to ScoLoHoFo, an all-star collective additionally that includes guitarist John Scofield, saxophonist Joe Lovano, bassist Dave Holland.

Circulating extra extensively as a bandleader from that time on, Foster enlisted youthful gamers just like the saxophonist Eli Degibri and bassist Doug Weiss; they joined him for a Live from the Village Vanguard broadcast on NPR in 2008.

Within the final decade, Foster was a stalwart on the Upper West Side membership Smoke, whose Smoke Sessions label launched his two most up-to-date albums. Reflections, from 2022, contains a quintet with trumpeter Nicholas Payton, saxophonist Chris Potter, pianist Kevin Hays and bassist Vicente Archer; Foster referred to as it “my best record yet.”

Aloysius Tyrone Foster was born on Jan. 18, 1943, in Richmond, Va. He grew up on a hundred and fortieth Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem, in a household of musical fans. His father was a bass participant, and his older brother performed congas; he additionally had a youthful sister and two youthful brothers. He confirmed curiosity within the drums as a toddler, banging on pots and pans; round age 12, he grew to become impressed by Max Roach, a rhythmic architect of bebop.

Foster was 20 when he logged his first recording credit score, on trumpeter Blue Mitchell’s 1964 album The Thing to Do, alongside a younger Chick Corea on piano. Foster additionally performed on Mitchell’s subsequent two albums, and on one of many first recordings by pianist Monty Alexander, earlier than linking up with Miles Davis, with whom he struck a private bond.

During a interval within the mid-’70s when Davis retreated from performing, Foster grew to become a confidante. “He was a real spiritual person, nice to be around,” Davis later wrote. “It was Al that kept me in touch with the music scene when I was out for those years. I used to talk to him almost every day when I was retired. I really trusted him during that time.”

In addition to Bonnie Rose Steinberg, Foster is survived by 4 daughters from a earlier marriage — Michelle, Kierra, Monique and Simone — and 6 grandchildren. His son with Steinberg, Brandyn, predeceased him in 2018.

Foster remained a significant presence on drums to the tip, main his personal band in an engagement at Smoke earlier this yr. “I’m getting old,” he admitted just a few years in the past, in an interview together with his fellow drummer Joe Farnsworth for DownBeat journal. “You know, I am not as fast as I used to be. But it’s more fresh ideas. I’m always coming up with new stuff when I practice. Because lately, I practice every day — drums, two sets in my living room. I just sit there for a few minutes, you know, almost like, ‘Whatcha gonna show me today?'”