Musician. He gained fame as an American drummer and bandleader, a powerful influence in jazz, and a prodigious nurturer of jazz talent. Born to a single mother who died shortly after his birth, he was raised by a family friend after being abandoned by his father. He had a paternal uncle who was musically inclined being a singer, choral leader, and music teacher. Outside of receiving some music lessons in school, he was a self-taught musician, and in the seventh grade, he began to play piano for a dance band for an income. In the 1930s, he switched from piano to drums. As drummer, he had a perfected unmistakable beat, which was polyrhythmic, propulsive, and had a thunderous signature style. From 1939 to 1944, he toured with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. After a race-related physical altercation with an Atlanta police officer, he received a head injury resulting in the insertion of a metal plate in his skull, and this injury prevented him from serving in the military during World War II. From 1944 to 1947, he played with Billy Eckstine's big band during the bebop era. After a trip to Africa in 1948, he was known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina following his conversion to Islam, yet professionally, he retained his birth name, but used the nickname of "Bu." With the decline of ballroom dancing, he became enthusiastic with avant-garde jazz for the rest of his career. Since 1954, he was the leader of "Jazz Messengers," which was a virtual conservatory for up-and-coming musicians. He founded "Jazz Messengers" with Horace Silver but following an evolution of the band, Silver left the group by 1956. The "Jazz Messengers" released studio recordings. By the 1950s and 1960s, the drums had become a much more popular instrument with what critics called "hard bop." During his career, he recruited and graduated a host of who's who of musicians, including Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Branford and Wynton Marsalis, Donald Byrd, McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett, Valery Ponomarev, Chuck Mangione, Chick Corea, Terence Blanchard, Jackie McLean, Johnny Griffin, and Donald Harrison to name a few major-league musicians. As he aged, his health declined yet he continued to play jazz even after becoming partially deaf. Starting early as a teenager, he married four times, divorced three times and along with other relationships, produced a total of twelve children. He died from the complication of lung cancer. By the time of his death, he had been the most dominating jazz musician in the business for several decades. Among his many accolades, he received, with the "Jazz Messengers," a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Group Performance in 1985, and he was inducted in the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1981 and received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 2005.