Idris Muhammad was born Leo Morris in New Orleans on November 13, 1939, and grew up in the city's 13th Ward next door to a dry cleaner's shop. He credited the sound of that shop's steam presser with shaping his hi-hat technique, which is as literal an account of where a musician's sound came from as any drummer has given.

He was working before he was ten. A Mardi Gras parade at 9, then a spot on The Hawketts' "Mardi Gras Mambo" at 14, then, two years later, the drums on Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill." When he asked the veteran New Orleans drummer Paul Barbarin to teach him to read music, Barbarin declined on the grounds that he was already good enough not to need it.

Joe Jones introduced him to Sam Cooke, and Cooke took him on the road. Chicago followed, with Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield, and then New York in the mid-1960s, where he joined the Apollo Theatre house band and began working with Kenny Dorham, Horace Silver, Betty Carter and Lou Donaldson. The Donaldson association became the longest of his career: twelve albums between 1965 and 1981, among them Alligator Bogaloo (Blue Note, 1967), recorded on April 7, 1967 at Van Gelder Studio with Lonnie Smith on organ and a 24-year-old George Benson on guitar. He is credited on that sleeve under his birth name. He converted to Islam and took the name Idris Muhammad during these same Donaldson years.

In 1967 he took the drum chair in the orchestra of the original off-Broadway production of Hair, wrote the show's drum parts, and stayed with it when it moved to Broadway, four years in all. He left to tour with Roberta Flack and worked with her for much of the following decade.

Alongside that he was the house drummer at Prestige, and he made more than 150 recordings for Prestige, Blue Note and CTI. Rudy Van Gelder took particular care with his drum sound, a working relationship that runs across most of the important records here. The credits from those years amount to a survey of how jazz became commercial: Paul Desmond's Summertime (A&M/CTI, 1968), George Benson's Goodies (1968) and The Other Side of Abbey Road (1969), Donald Byrd's Fancy Free (Blue Note, 1969), Charles Earland's Black Talk! (Prestige, 1969), Bobbi Humphrey's debut Flute-In (Blue Note, 1971), Grover Washington Jr.'s debut Inner City Blues (Kudu, 1971), and three Kudu albums with Hank Crawford between 1972 and 1975.

His own leader career began at Prestige with Black Rhythm Revolution! in 1971 and Peace and Rhythm in 1972, both of them New Orleans parade figures worked through a soul-jazz rhythm section, with Melvin Sparks on guitar and Bob Porter supervising. Then came Kudu, Creed Taylor's R&B-leaning sister label to CTI, where he made four albums. Power of Soul (1974) is the best known: recorded in March 1974 at Van Gelder Studio with Bob James arranging and conducting, Grover Washington Jr. on saxophones, Randy Brecker on trumpet, Joe Beck on guitar and Ralph MacDonald on percussion, with four tracks by Jimi Hendrix, James, Beck and Washington. AllMusic gives it five stars.

House of the Rising Sun followed in 1976, with a young David Sanborn on alto and Eric Gale on guitar and bass. Then Turn This Mutha Out in 1977, produced and arranged by David Matthews rather than Creed Taylor and aimed squarely at the R&B and disco charts. It yielded two pop and R&B hits, the title track and "Could Heaven Ever Be Like This," and it split the critics: the Bay State Banner wrote in June 1977 that "Muhammad is another jazz artist who has succumbed to the lure of money via the disco sound," and the Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide later gave it two stars out of five. "Could Heaven Ever Be Like This" went on to become one of the most sampled records in the genre, taken up by Jamiroquai on "Alright" (1996), by Onyx on "I'm So 90's," and by Jamie xx and Romy Madley Croft on "Loud Places" (In Colour, 2015).

After a move to Fantasy for You Ain't No Friend of Mine! (1978), Foxhuntin' (1979) and Make It Count (1980), he made the sharpest turn of his career in the same year as that last record: Kabsha on Theresa, a piano-less quartet with George Coleman and Pharoah Sanders both on tenor and Ray Drummond on bass, engineered by Van Gelder.

At the end of the 1970s he joined Johnny Griffin's band and began a long association with Pharoah Sanders that produced Journey to the One (1980), Heart Is a Melody (1983), Shukuru (1985) and Africa (1987). He moved to Europe in the 1980s and stayed through that decade, recording with Randy Weston, Chico Freeman, Nathan Davis and the Paris Reunion Band. Returning to New York in the 1990s, he worked with John Hicks, Dr. Lonnie Smith, John Scofield, Monty Alexander, Archie Shepp, David Murray, Sonny Rollins and Ahmad Jamal, whose trio he held down across nine albums between 1995 and 2010. His own Right Now (Cannonball, 1998), with Gary Bartz, George Coleman and Joe Lovano, was his last studio album as a leader.

He returned to New Orleans in 2011 and published his autobiography, Inside the Music: The Life of Idris Muhammad, in 2012. Istanbul Agop, whose cymbals he endorsed, produced a 22-inch Idris Muhammad signature ride. He passed away on July 29, 2014, at 74, of kidney failure, and was buried according to Islamic tradition in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The foundation is New Orleans: second-line and parade rhythms, learned in the street before they were learned anywhere else, and carried into every context he played in afterward. What made him valuable to producers was that he could deliver those figures inside a studio arrangement without ever crowding it. His playing sits low and stays there, and the groove is the point rather than the display.

The hi-hat is the signature. He described it as coming from the steam presser at the dry cleaner's next door to his childhood home, a hissing, exhaling pulse on the offbeat that is recognisable across records made thirty years apart. It is also the reason his records became sampling material: the pattern is complete on its own and loops without needing anything around it.

He worked in an unusually wide range for a player so identified with one sound. The same drummer is on Lou Donaldson boogaloo dates, Pharoah Sanders spiritual jazz, Kudu disco crossover, Ahmad Jamal trio records and Sonny Rollins's Global Warming. Talking to Modern Drummer about the risk of changing his name, he said the recognition never depended on the billing: "Everybody knew right away that it was me, because of my style of playing."