Elvin Jones was one of the most important drummers of the post-bop era, a musician who reconciled an innate swinging style with an exploratory approach that spilled over bar lines and elevated the drum kit to a kind of circular sound machine that provided a pulse as well as melodic content. Born in 1927 into a storied jazz family in Pontiac, Michigan—his brothers included pianist Hank Jones and trumpeter Thad Jones—the drummer taught himself to play music as a teenager, and after serving in the Army between 1946 and 1949 he immersed himself in Detroit’s bustling jazz scene, where he played with pianist Tommy Flanagan and guitarist Kenny Burrell, among others. Jones moved to New York in 1956, where he quickly found work, but it was his membership in the John Coltrane Quartet between 1960 and 1966 that secured his legendary status as he brought sophistication and power to classics like the 1964 album A Love Supreme. After that he began leading his own bands, cutting a series of albums for Blue Note in the late 1960s and early 1970s while continuing to work as a sideman for the likes of pianist McCoy Tyner and saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, and Frank Foster. In the 1980s, his group the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine became his prime vehicle for the last two decades of his life, codifying his hard-driving music and extended improvisational practice into a well-oiled machine that included sidemen like Sonny Fortune, Ravi Coltrane, and Kenny Kirkland. Jones continued playing as his health faltered in the early 2000s, even bringing an oxygen tank onstage. He died of heart failure in 2004, aged 76.