Al Foster, a drummer who worked with some of the most illustrious names in jazz across a career spanning more than six decades, leaving his distinctive stamp on important recordings by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson and many others, died on Wednesday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 82.
His daughter Kierra Foster-Ba announced the death on social media but did not specify a cause.
Mr. Foster came up emulating great bebop percussionists like Max Roach, but his most high-profile early gig came with Mr. Davis, who hired him in 1972, when he was refining an aggressive, funk-informed sound. Mr. Foster’s springy backbeats firmly anchored the band’s sprawling psychedelic jams.
In “Miles: The Autobiography,” written with Quincy Troupe and published in 1989, Mr. Davis praised Mr. Foster’s ability to “keep the groove going forever.”
Mr. Foster also excelled in a more conventional jazz mode, lending an alert, conversational swing to bands led by the saxophonists Mr. Henderson and Mr. Rollins and the pianists Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Tommy Flanagan.
“What he was doing was reminiscent of some of the great drummers of our period,” Mr. Rollins said of Mr. Foster in a phone interview, citing foundational figures like Art Blakey and Max Roach. “He always had that feeling about him, those great feelings of those people. And that’s why I could never be disappointed playing with Al Foster. He was always playing something which I related to.”
Mr. Foster often framed his long career as a fulfillment of his early ambitions.
“I’ve been so blessed because I’ve played with everybody I fell in love with when I was a young teenager,” he told the website of Jazz Forum, a club in Tarrytown, N.Y.
Mr. Foster also led his own bands and composed a wealth of original music.
“Every note meant everything to him, and you could feel that in the way that he played,” Adam Birnbaum, a pianist who worked steadily with Mr. Foster in his later years, said in an interview.
Aloysius Tyrone Foster was born on Jan. 18, 1943, in Richmond, Va. The second of five children born to John and Thelma (Giles) Foster, he grew up mainly in Harlem, where the family moved when he was 10. His father owned a dry-cleaning service, and his mother later did domestic work.
He gravitated to rhythm early on, partly through an older brother who played congas. “My aunt said when I was 3, I was banging on pots and pans,” Mr. Foster said in a 2022 DownBeat interview. His father bought him a drum set, but he didn’t get serious about the instrument until he heard a 1955 recording of “Cherokee” by the group Mr. Roach led with the trumpeter Clifford Brown.
“I didn’t know you could make music on the drums, so after that, when I came home from school, every day I’d set up my drums and put my ear to the speaker to try to figure out what he was doing,” he later said.
Mr. Foster left high school early to help care for Ms. Foster-Ba, the first of four daughters born to him and his first wife, Tina Hunt. He made his recording debut in 1964 on “The Thing to Do,” an album by the trumpeter Blue Mitchell; though only 21, he was already showing a firm grasp of the era’s broad rhythmic palette, including shimmying calypso beats and deep swing.
Mr. Davis recruited Mr. Foster after hearing him play at the Cellar, a club on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “He knocked me out because he had such a groove and he would just lay it right in there,” Mr. Davis wrote in his autobiography.
As heard on live albums like “In Concert,” “Dark Magus” and “Agharta,” Mr. Foster — informed by records by Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and James Brown that his employer recommended — brought an indefatigable locomotive power to Mr. Davis’s groups.
Though he excelled at the pop-conscious style Mr. Davis favored in that era, the aesthetic wasn’t always to his liking.
“I never cared for what I did with him in the ’70s,” he told All About Jazz in 2009 of his work with Mr. Davis. “I was a jazz drummer, and I thought when he asked me to join the band, I thought it was jazz. But who’s gonna turn down a job with Miles Davis?”
Still, his personal relationship with Mr. Davis was strong, and it endured through the trumpeter’s hiatus in the second half of the 1970s and his return to music in the ’80s and continued until his death in 1991.
Mr. Foster’s first gig with Mr. Rollins, at the Village Vanguard in 1969, lasted only two nights before the famously exacting bandleader let him go. But Mr. Rollins called again in 1978 and invited Mr. Foster to perform with him in Europe, and they worked together on and off through the mid-1990s.
“Al had a lot of what it took to really swing a band,” Mr. Rollins said. (He noted that “Harlem Boys,” the funky opening track on his 1979 album, “Don’t Ask,” was named in honor of their shared Harlem heritage.)
Mr. Foster also recorded often with Mr. Tyner, toured with Mr. Hancock and performed with Mr. Henderson in a celebrated trio that also included Ron Carter on bass. That group’s signature release, “The State of the Tenor,” recorded live in 1985, came to be regarded as a jazz classic.
In the 2000s, Mr. Foster formed the collaborative group ScoLoHoFo with the saxophonist Joe Lovano, the guitarist John Scofield and the bassist Dave Holland. He also stepped up his bandleading efforts, showcasing his writing on albums like “Inspirations & Dedications” (2019), which included pieces inspired by various family members.
“He would hear a melody in his head and he would go to the piano very slowly and sort of work it out one note at a time,” Mr. Birnbaum said, describing the way Mr. Foster, who did not have conventional musical training, composed.
Mr. Foster’s marriage to Ms. Hunt ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Foster-Ba, he is survived by Bonnie Rose Steinberg, his partner of more than 45 years; three other daughters: Simone Foster, Michelle Morris and Monique Magestro; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Brandyn Dayne Foster, his son with Ms. Steinberg, died in 2017.
Mr. Foster framed his musical life as a perpetual search for individuality and surprise. As he told the journalist Ted Panken for the liner notes to his most recent album, “Reflections” (2022), “When I was coming up, I tried to play like Art Taylor and my solos were like Max Roach. When I heard Tony Williams, and then a little later Joe Chambers and Jack DeJohnette, I said to myself, ‘What about me? How come I don’t hear my own stuff?’ It took me years to find something that nobody else played.”
That quest continued up until his last years. “ I hate it if I keep playing what I know,” Mr. Foster said in 2022, describing his daily practice routine. “Show me something I don’t know. I want something different.”
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