If you know one Nat Adderley song, it's probably Work Song (1960). Everybody's covered it, from organ trios to hip-hop samples, and it's the kind of tune that sounds like it's always existed — simple, churchy, built on a groove you can clap along to before you even know the melody. That's Nat Adderley in a nutshell. He wasn't chasing the fastest lines or the most outside harmony. He wanted you to feel something in your chest, and he wrote and played toward that goal his whole life.

He played cornet instead of trumpet, which matters more than it sounds like it should. The cornet has a rounder, softer edge — less brass, more breath — and Nat leaned into that. His solos had a vocal quality, almost like a preacher building a sermon, phrase by phrase, never rushing. He came up through bebop like everybody did in the fifties, but his instincts were always more toward blues and gospel. That's why he fit so naturally into what people started calling soul jazz — Horace Silver and Bobby Timmons were writing the same kind of tunes around the same time, catchy heads over a heavy backbeat, and Nat was right there with them.

Most of his career ran parallel to his brother Cannonball Adderley's. He joined Cannonball's quintet in 1959 and stayed, on and off, until Cannonball died in 1975. That band — with Joe Zawinul on piano for a stretch, and drummer Louis Hayes holding it all together — was one of the most popular working jazz groups of the era, filling clubs when a lot of straight-ahead jazz was struggling to find an audience. People sometimes talk about that group like it was just Cannonball's show, but Nat's writing and playing were half the reason it worked. He wasn't a sideman who happened to be related to the leader. He was the other half of the sound.

He never really became a star on his own the way his brother did, and if you ask casual listeners to name him they'll probably draw a blank. But musicians knew. He led his own dates over the years — worth digging into if you like the quintet sound but want to hear him stretch out a little more as a leader — and he kept working steadily right up until his health failed in the nineties. He lost part of a leg to diabetes late in life and kept playing anyway, which tells you something about how much the music actually meant to him, not as a career but as something closer to a need.