There are no immediate details on how Hawkins died, although the band said in a statement on Friday that his death was a “tragic and premature loss”.
The Foo Fighters were scheduled to perform at a festival in Bogota, Colombia, on Friday night.  Hawkins’s last concert was on Sunday at another festival in San Isidro, Argentina.
“His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live with us all forever,” he said in a message on the band’s official Twitter account, which was also emailed to reporters.  “Our hearts are with his wife, children and family.”
Police vehicles, an ambulance and fans gathered outside the hotel in northern Bogota, where Hawkins is believed to be staying.
“It was a band I grew up with. It leaves me empty,” Juan Sebastian Anchique, 23, told the Associated Press as he mourned Hawkins outside the hotel.
Colombian police have confirmed the death but did not provide details.  The US Embassy in Bogota expressed its condolences in a tweet.
After Grohl, Hawkins was the most recognizable member of the band, appearing alongside the singer in interviews and playing prominent, usually comedic, roles in the band’s memorable videos and in the recent horror comedy “Studio 666”.
Hawkins was the touring drummer for Alanis Morrissette when he joined the Foo Fighters in 1997. “Best of You”.
In Grohl’s 2021 book, The Storyteller, he called Hawkins “his brother from another mother, my best friend, a man for whom I would take a bullet.”
“With the first meeting, our bond was direct and we were closer with every day, every song, every note we ever played together,” Grohl wrote.  “We are absolutely destined to be and I am grateful to be in this life.”
This is the second time Grohl has experienced the death of a close teammate.  Grohl was the Nirvana drummer when Kurt Cobain died in 1994.
Tributes surfaced on social media about Hawkins on Friday night.
“God bless you, Taylor Hawkins,” Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello wrote on Twitter, along with a photo of himself, Hawkins and Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Ferrell.  “I loved your spirit and your unstoppable rock power.”
“What an incredible talent, who also did not have to be so kind and generous and cool, but it was all anyway,” wrote Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother, co-writer and producer, on Twitter.  “People were so lucky to have their gifts for the time they had.”
Born Oliver Taylor Hawkins in Fort Worth Texas in 1972, Hawkins grew up in Laguna Beach, California.  He played in the small band of Southern California Sylvia before doing his first big concert as a drummer for the Canadian singer Sass Jordan.
Hawkins told the Associated Press in 2019 that his first drum influences included Stewart Copeland of The Police, Roger Taylor of the Queen, and Phil Collins, who he said was “one of my favorite drummers. You know, the “People forget that he was a great drummer as well as a handsome man wearing a sweater from the ’80s, poor thing.”
When he spent two years in the mid-1990s playing drums for Morrissette, he was mainly inspired by Jane’s Stephen Perkins’s play.
“My drums were set up like that, the whole thing,” Hawkins told the AP.  “I was still a bit of a copywriter at that point. It takes a while to create your own style. I didn’t sound just like him, I sound like me, but he was a big, huge influence.”
He and Grohl met backstage at a show when Hawkins was still with Morissette.  Grohl’s band would have an opening shortly after then-drummer William Goldsmith left.  Grohl called Hawkins, who was a huge fan of the Foo Fighters, and he accepted immediately.
“I’m not afraid to say that our chance meeting was a kind of love at first sight, which lit a musical ‘twin flame’ that still burns to this day,” Grohl wrote in his book.  “Together, we have become an unstoppable duo, on stage and off stage, seeking every adventure we can find.”
Hawkins first appeared with the band in the 1997 video for Foo Fighters’ most popular song, “Everlong,” although he had not yet joined the band when the song was recorded.  It would, however, continue to launch epic versions hundreds of times until the climax of the Foo Fighters concerts.
In another highlight of the band’s live performances, Grohl would step behind the drums and Hawkins would grab the microphone to sing a cover of Queen’s “Somebody to Love”.
“The best part of becoming a Foo Fighters singer for a single song is that I really have the best rock ‘n’ roll drummer on earth,” Hawkins said before the song at a March 18 concert in Chile.
Grohl is heard telling him to shut up.
Hawkins also co-starred in the recently released Foo Fighters horror comedy “Studio 666,” in which a demonic force in a house where the band lives occupies Grohl and turns him into a murderer.  Hawkins and the other members of the band are killed one by one.  The case arose from their work on their 10th studio album at a home in Los Angeles.
He also drums and sang for the side-project trio Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders.  They released an album, “Get the Money”, in 2006.
Hawkins was survived by his wife Allison and their three children.
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Associated Press writer Manuel Rueda contributed to this report from Bogota, Colombia.