Duke grew up in San Francisco and came up through a serious jazz education, studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He had the technical foundation to go wherever he wanted, and early on that meant working with people like Jean-Luc Ponty and cutting his teeth in the Bay Area club scene. You can hear on his earliest records that he wasn't chasing any one thing — he was genuinely curious about all of it, from post-bop piano to the new electronic instruments that were starting to show up everywhere.

The Frank Zappa years are still kind of startling when you think about them. Duke joined the Mothers of Invention in the early 1970s and stayed for several stints, playing everything from Stravinsky-influenced weirdness to raw funk, sometimes in the same song. Zappa clearly valued Duke's ability to commit fully to whatever the music required, and Duke in turn got a platform to be unpredictable in ways a straight jazz gig would never have allowed. He also started doing more vocals during this period, which would matter a lot later.

His solo records from the mid-to-late 1970s are where a lot of people came in. Albums like The Aura Will Prevail (1975) and especially Reach for It (1977) showed him moving decisively toward funk and R&B without apologizing for it. The Fender Rhodes and synthesizer work on those records still sounds good — warm but punchy, with a sense of groove that wasn't just borrowed from elsewhere. He was also a sought-after producer and collaborator during this period, working with Cannonball Adderley, Billy Cobham, and others.

His partnership with Stanley Clarke deserves its own mention. The Clarke/Duke Project releases in the early 1980s were genuinely popular records — pop-crossover stuff, basically — and the two of them seemed to have real chemistry that came through in a relaxed, almost effortless way. It was a long way from Frank Zappa's stage, but Duke never seemed embarrassed by the commercial success. He just moved between worlds.

Late in his career he returned more explicitly to jazz, and it suited him. By then he had this enormous range of experience to draw from — classical training, avant-garde experimentation, funk production, R&B arranging — and it all showed up in his playing without feeling like a résumé. He died in 2013, and what you notice when you go back through his catalog is how consistent the quality of his actual playing is across wildly different contexts. He wasn't trying to be all things to all people; he just happened to be genuinely good at a lot of different things.