Tyner

Foster played in groups with jazz titans like Art Pepper, McCoy Tyner and Horace Silver, among many others.

In 1978, he joined the supergroup Milestones Jazzstars with Tyner, Rollins and Ron Carter, and made his debut as a bandleader that same year with “Mixed Roots.”

Davis mentions a dazzling array of influences from other great African American composers as well, such as Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Charles Mingus and McCoy Tyner.

The Coltrane quartet takes that piece to regions the songwriters Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer doubtless never imagined, deep to an African realm, particularly courtesy of Elvin Jones’s distinctive, roiling drums, with Jimmy Garrison’s cascading bass lines and McCoy Tyner’s insistent block chords propelling Coltrane’s tenor saxophone theme statement and subsequent essay.

The band, which included McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, still sought communion with higher powers, but it seemed they wanted to play the loudest notes possible to foster it.