Steve McCall came up in Chicago in the 1950s playing straight-ahead gigs like everybody else, but he found his real voice once the AACM started shaking things loose in the mid-60s. He wasn't a loud drummer or a flashy one. He played like someone who'd rather leave a gap than fill it, and that restraint turned out to be exactly what the city's new music needed.

His most important work came with Air, the trio he formed with Henry Threadgill and Fred Hopkins. That band didn't sound like a typical free jazz group pounding away at intensity for its own sake. They had a strange lightness to them, almost conversational, and McCall's drumming was the reason it worked. He'd shade a rhythm instead of stating it, suggest a pulse instead of locking into one. Albums like Air Lore (1979) show this off well — ragtime tunes by Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton filtered through a trio that treats the material with respect but refuses to play it safe.

McCall also spent real time in Europe, which wasn't unusual for American avant-garde musicians who found more work and more open ears abroad than they did at home. He recorded and performed widely there through the 70s, building a reputation among European free improvisers as a drummer who could hold a group together without ever dominating it.

What made him valuable to so many different bandleaders was his ear. He listened the way a good accompanist listens, always finding the open space in the music rather than crowding it. That's not a flashy skill, and it rarely gets you magazine covers, but ask any musician who played with him and they'll tell you he made the whole band sound smarter. He didn't invent a new way of playing the drums so much as prove how much could be said by someone willing to play less.