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

Al Foster, whose superbly alert and flexible drumming formed a swirling current in modern jazz for more than 60 years, propelling bands led by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and many others, died on Wednesday in his New York City apartment. He was 82.

Bonnie Rose Steinberg, his partner of more than 47 years, confirmed his death to NPR Music. She said Foster died from a serious illness.

Foster had a strong yet supple beat, and the intuitive ability to shift his rhythmic balance to suit the musical setting. His swinging ride cymbal could convey the crisp authority of bebop or the deep pull of modal jazz, and he provided the thrashing backbeat in some prominent 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 during the sessions for his 1972 album On the Corner. Joining Davis’ working band, Foster appeared on studio albums like Big Fun and live albums like Dark Magus and Agharta. 

But Foster preferred to swing, and he did so mightily in a range of notable settings. He worked on and off with Rollins, one of his musical heroes, for several decades. Foster also appears on a defining double album by another 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, also worked alongside Foster in groups led by alto saxophonist Art Pepper and pianists McCoy Tyner and Horace Silver, among others. In 1978, Foster’s sterling reputation in straight-ahead jazz circles was made manifest in a record-label supergroup branded the Milestones Jazzstars, which toured widely and released a live album.

Foster made his debut as a leader that same year: the funk-flexing Mixed Roots, on CBS Records. But he was sparse with his solo releases in the ensuing years, turning a corner in 2003 with Oh! — credited to ScoLoHoFo, an all-star collective also featuring guitarist John Scofield, saxophonist Joe Lovano, bassist Dave Holland.

Circulating more widely as a bandleader from that point on, Foster enlisted younger players 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 last decade, Foster was a stalwart at the Upper West Side club Smoke, whose Smoke Sessions label released his two most recent albums. Reflections, from 2022, features a quintet with trumpeter Nicholas Payton, saxophonist Chris Potter, pianist Kevin Hays and bassist Vicente Archer; Foster called it “my best record yet.”

Aloysius Tyrone Foster was born on Jan. 18, 1943, in Richmond, Va. He grew up on 140th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem, in a family of musical enthusiasts. His father was a bass player, and his older brother played congas; he also had a younger sister and two younger brothers. He showed interest in the drums as a toddler, banging on pots and pans; around age 12, he became inspired by Max Roach, a rhythmic architect of bebop.

Foster was 20 when he logged his first recording credit, on trumpeter Blue Mitchell’s 1964 album The Thing to Do, alongside a young Chick Corea on piano. Foster also played on Mitchell’s next two albums, and on one of the first recordings by pianist Monty Alexander, before linking up with Miles Davis, with whom he struck a personal bond.

During a period in the mid-’70s when Davis retreated from performing, Foster became 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 four daughters from a previous marriage — Michelle, Kierra, Monique and Simone — and six grandchildren. His son with Steinberg, Brandyn, predeceased him in 2018.

Foster remained a vital presence on drums to the end, leading his own band in an engagement at Smoke earlier this year. “I’m getting old,” he admitted a few years ago, in an interview with his fellow drummer Joe Farnsworth for DownBeat magazine. “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?'”