Jazz drummer Al Foster, photographed in Paris in 1980.
Andre Clergeat/Gamma-Rapho through Getty Photographs
cover caption
toggle caption
Andre Clergeat/Gamma-Rapho through Getty Photographs
Al Foster, whose beautifully alert and versatile drumming fashioned a swirling present in fashionable jazz for greater than 60 years, propelling bands led by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and lots of others, died on Wednesday in his New York Metropolis residence. He was 82.
Bonnie Rose Steinberg, his companion of greater than 47 years, confirmed his dying to NPR Music. She stated Foster died from a critical sickness.
Foster had a robust but supple beat, and the intuitive means to shift his rhythmic stability to swimsuit the musical setting. His swinging experience cymbal might convey the crisp authority of bebop or the deep pull of modal jazz, and he supplied the beating backbeat in some distinguished fusion bands.
“He knocked me out as a result of he had such a groove and he would simply lay it proper in there,” Davis wrote in Miles: The Autobiography. The trumpeter honored that bedrock groove with a hallucinatory funk composition titled “Mr. Foster,” recorded in the course of the classes for his 1972 album On the Nook. Becoming a member of Davis’ working band, Foster appeared on studio albums like Huge Enjoyable and reside albums like Darkish Magus and Agharta.
YouTube
However Foster most popular to swing, and he did so mightily in a variety 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 Artwork Pepper and pianists McCoy Tyner and Horace Silver, amongst others. In 1978, Foster’s sterling popularity in straight-ahead jazz circles was made manifest in a record-label supergroup branded the Milestones Jazzstars, which toured broadly and launched a reside album.
YouTube
Foster made his debut as a frontrunner that very same 12 months: the funk-flexing Combined Roots, on CBS Information. However he was sparse along 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 broadly 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 Stay from the Village Vanguard broadcast on NPR in 2008.
Inside the final decade, Foster was a stalwart on the Higher West Aspect membership Smoke, whose Smoke Periods label launched his two most up-to-date albums. Reflections, from 2022, incorporates a quintet with trumpeter Nicholas Payton, saxophonist Chris Potter, pianist Kevin Hays and bassist Vicente Archer; Foster known as it “my greatest report but.”
YouTube
Aloysius Tyrone Foster was born on Jan. 18, 1943, in Richmond, Va. He grew up on one hundred and fortieth Avenue and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem, in a household of musical fanatics. 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 Factor 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.
Throughout a interval within the mid-’70s when Davis retreated from performing, Foster grew to become a confidante. “He was an actual non secular particular person, good to be round,” Davis later wrote. “It was Al that stored me in contact with the music scene once I was out for these years. I used to speak to him nearly each day once I was retired. I actually trusted him throughout that point.”
Along with 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 top, main his personal band in an engagement at Smoke earlier this 12 months. “I am getting previous,” he admitted a couple of years in the past, in an interview along with his fellow drummer Joe Farnsworth for DownBeat journal. “You realize, I’m not as quick as I was. But it surely’s extra recent concepts. I am at all times developing with new stuff once I observe. As a result of currently, I observe each day — drums, two units in my front room. I simply sit there for a couple of minutes, you already know, nearly like, ‘Whatcha gonna present me as we speak?'”