The great drummer Al Foster has passed away at the age of 82.
The NEA Jazz Master’s death was confirmed by his daughter, Keira Foster, in an Instagram post (linked below).
TRIBUTE BY T. BRUCE WITTET
Al Foster (1943–2025) – A Wide Grin and Enormous Presence
I swear, the rivets in his cymbal are still dancing. It’s been almost a week since Al Foster passed, and yet his pulse lingers.
Born January 18, 1943, in Richmond, Virginia, Al moved to New York early and fell headlong into drums. As a young player, he was self-taught – and he earnestly pursued mastery. Drumming veterans saw his passion and they couldn’t help but share old wisdom. His warmth and flickering right hand won them over. He absorbed their vocabulary and made it his own.
When I first heard Al Foster, I thought I was listening to Papa Jo Jones. Like Papa Jo, he flicked the snares off when playing brushes. With the snares off, the snare drum became a tom with orchestral sensitivity, and a source of marshmallow mallet rolls. Al’s one-handed roll was a marvel: the stick, held loosely, struck both snare and floor tom in a toggle-like pattern that built into a long tone…a roll. Over this, he’d call up ideas that otherwise sat unheard.
Timekeeping was undergoing a major shift. For decades, jazz drummers had anchored the music with a four-on-the-floor bass drum pulse. But Al and his peers let the ride cymbal handle the four-pulse leaving the bass drum free for ‘feathering’ that pulse. Al, with his tall top cymbals, in effect played both of them too as rides, both as drums. When swing faded, Al’s chosen form, hard bop took hold. Dance halls gave way to the club scene. Hard bop was made for these clubs and Foster’s explorations of drums and cymbals went front and centre. He found his voice and his tall, vertically suspended cymbals projected his ideas with clarity and consistency. They forced him to sit tall and they were so close that room acoustics were minimized, enabling him to hear the identical tone room to room.
Al’s first major gig was with Blue Mitchell, recording two albums in the early ’60s. Soon he was playing with Joe Henderson, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, and Horace Silver. But it was his long association with Miles Davis that arguably cemented his legacy. When Miles returned from retirement, Al Foster still fronted the energy and groove. He played on We Want Miles, the Grammy-winning album that brought Miles back into the spotlight.
That Miles album, that charted high on Billboard, was less jazz than what one colleague called “instrumental R&B”. But the Miles years funded Al Foster’s studies in jazz composition and got him into the studio for solo albums.
“He was a mentor and a beloved friend,” says drummer Adam Nussbaum. “Al taught me so much—about music, about putting the song first. The masters all seem to see the whole song, not just the rhythm. His cymbal beat was wide and his drums, tuned lower than other bop drummers, sustained longer. It worked well.”
Veteran drummer Ian Froman remembers first hearing Al on Dave Liebman’s Quest (1981), played on Jack DeJohnette’s famous Paiste Dark Ride cymbal. “It could play powerfully or whisper. I used the same cymbal on a lot of gigs with Dave.”
Al Foster was a perennial in DownBeat polls from the ’70s onward, with accolades from magazines, from the International Jazz Journalists Association. And of course, there’s the Grammy. But let’s not forget the NEA Jazz Masters fellowship—a prize earned by a man who spent every free minute chasing wisdom in rhythm.
Al Foster is gone. But his smile is preserved in photographs, and his music. If you want to go through it, you’ll need at least a year! As Adam Nussbaum said, “God bless Al Foster” who became his mentor and his friend. I can’t speak for Him but Al Foster must count among the Good Ones.
