If you ask serious musicians who the best accompanist in jazz history was, Jimmy Rowles comes up a lot. Not because he had flash — he didn't chase attention at the keyboard — but because he listened better than almost anyone. He could follow a singer's breath, anticipate where they were going to bend a phrase, and drop in a chord voicing that made the whole moment land. Singers loved him for it. Billie Holiday worked with him, Ella Fitzgerald trusted him, Peggy Lee kept him close for years. That's not a small list.

Rowles grew up in Spokane, Washington, came up through the big band world in the 1940s playing with outfits like Woody Herman's and Benny Goodman's, and eventually settled into the Los Angeles studio scene, which is partly why his name didn't travel as far as his talent deserved — he was working constantly, just not always under his own billing. His piano style was harmonically curious in a way that set him apart from the era's cleaner, more predictable comping. He loved odd substitutions, unexpected voicings, a kind of harmonic mischief that never felt showy, just personal.

He wasn't only a side man. His playing with saxophonist Stan Getz on The Peacocks (1977) is a good entry point if you want to hear him lead rather than support — it's intimate, a little melancholy, full of the harmonic detours that made other musicians pay attention. He also wrote the tune that gives that album its title, a piece that's become something of a standard among pianists who know where to look. That's the thing about Rowles: his influence moves through musicians' musicians more than through hit records.

He had a reputation as a character too — funny, a little gruff, full of stories from decades on bandstands and in studios. His daughter, Stacy Rowles, became a respected trumpet and flugelhorn player, and they recorded together later in his life, which says something about how much music was just the family business by then. Rowles never had anything close to a pop breakthrough, and he probably didn't need one. He built a career on being indispensable to the people who actually made the records everyone remembers, and if you spend time with his playing, you start hearing him everywhere you didn't expect.