If you grew up in New Orleans in the 1930s and 40s, you learned rhythm before you learned anything else — brass bands, church, Mardi Gras Indians, the whole city moving to a pulse. Ed Blackwell absorbed all of that and then did something almost nobody else thought to do with it: he carried it straight into the most radical jazz being made in America.

He's best known for his work with Ornette Coleman, where his drumming on records like This Is Our Music (1960) and Free Jazz (1961) gave Coleman's harmolodic experiments a kind of grounded swing that kept the music from floating off into abstraction. Where a lot of free jazz drumming of that era leaned toward density and noise, Blackwell played with space and groove. You can hear the New Orleans in the way he'd lay a second-line pattern under a completely free melodic line, and somehow it would just work — loose, danceable, and strange at the same time.

His partnership with Don Cherry stretched across decades, through small groups and the later band Old and New Dreams, which reunited several of Coleman's old sidemen — Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Dewey Redman — to keep that sound alive without Coleman himself in the room. The self-titled Old and New Dreams (1979) album is a good entry point if you want to hear Blackwell leading from the kit rather than just supporting someone else's vision. He also recorded duo albums with Redman, stripping things down to just horn and drums, which forces you to really listen to how melodic his playing actually was.

Blackwell spent his later years teaching at Wesleyan University, passing on that New Orleans rhythmic vocabulary to younger drummers even as kidney disease forced him onto dialysis and slowed him down physically. He never became a household name the way some of his bandmates did, but ask any serious jazz drummer about him and you'll get a different kind of respect — the kind reserved for someone who actually changed how people think about what a drum kit can say.