As a boy of 14, Max Roach used to draw himself a moustache using his mother’s eyeliner, hop on the subway from his Brooklyn home, and bluff his way into the smoke-filled nightclubs of 52nd Street, in New York, where the great stars of jazz could be heard at first hand.

He liked nothing better than to sit close to whoever was playing on the bandstand at Kelly’s Stable, then to travel uptown, and stand next to the stage at the Savoy Ballroom, Harlem, where he could watch his childhood idol Chick Webb, the tiny hunchback who was the first great virtuoso jazz drummer.

By the time he left high school in 1942, there was no doubt among the New York jazz community that Roach would develop a talent to eclipse Webb’s, but few realised that he would be the single most influential drummer in modern jazz from the 1940s to the 1990s.

He was the innovative player who defined the percussion style to accompany Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, as they searched relentlessly for a new jazz language in the mid1940s.

He provided the percussion textures for Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool nonet at the end of that decade, and in the 1950s formed one of the seminal “hard bop” groups with the trumpeter Clifford Brown.

After Brown’s death in 1956, Roach became a more overtly political figure, simultaneously producing work that eloquently and passionately argued the case for racial equality, but which also explored the prevailing interest in free improvisation and unusual time signatures.

Along with his contemporary, Art Blakey, he pioneered the concept of solo drum recordings and percussion-based ensembles, and subsequently, with his daughter, the viola player Maxine Roach, he explored in some depth the interstices between the long-established classical string quartet and jazz.

He wrote music for Broadway plays, and collaborated with dancers and choirs. He had a strong interest in documenting his work, and with Charles Mingus founded the Debut record label in 1952, which captured some of the finest moments in modern jazz, including the legendary 1953 Massey Hall concert from Toronto, in which the label’s owners played alongside Parker, Gillespie and the pianist Bud Powell.

However, the boundaries between documentation and the commercial imperative were blurred on that particular occasion, when Mingus got the tapes back to New York and found he was inaudible on what has often been hailed as the greatest of all live bebop concerts.

“On some of the pieces he just dubbed himself back in,” recalled Roach. “I think it’s one of the earliest times that a person overdubbed themselves.”

Maxwell Roach was born in Newland, North Carolina, and spent his infancy in the picturesquely named Dismal Swamp, before moving to the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn, where he attended high school, and from where he later went to study briefly at the Manhattan School of Music.

His formal training had begun with a former Scottish drum major, but his real apprenticeship came in playing for the variety shows at the Darktown Follies on Coney Island, and then in the after-hours clubs of Harlem, the Uptown House and Minton’s. There, from 1942, he became one of the circle of players who with Parker, Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and his fellow drummer Kenny Clark developed the style known as bebop.

In the winter of 1943-44 he worked with Gillespie in the first bebop quintet to play regularly on 52nd Street, at the Onyx Club, from which a scratchy private recording shows that he, aged only 19, had already developed the basis of his style.

Keeping the beat on the ride cymbal, he used snare and bass drum punctuations to converse with Gillespie’s fiery trumpet, and to enrich the rhythmic density of the performance.

By the time he came to record commercially with Coleman Hawkins in February 1944, in a band organised by Gillespie, Roach demonstrated his consummate mastery of his new style, on pieces such as Bu-Dee-Daht and Woody ’n’ You.

This was the antithesis of the swing era approach he had so admired in Chick Webb, but as Roach was occasionally to demonstrate in later life, such as in a BBC film made at the Ritz Hotel in London with Cab Calloway, when necessary he remained a brilliant exponent of swing drumming, sitting erect at the kit, producing perfect press rolls and even clattering through the tap-dance routines of the Nicholas Brothers, in perfect synchronisation with their feet.

In the late 1940s his main work was with Parker’s quintet, and in particular the version of this band that included the young Davis on trumpet. Roach’s playing matches the fluidity and drive of Parker’s on the celebrated recording of Koko from November 1945, which is one of the most influential of all modern jazz discs.

Although Roach toured with Gillespie’s 1945 big band (during which the trumpeter’s assiduous counselling and support helped Roach to kick a nascent heroin habit) his real talent was, and remained, small group jazz, in which his rhythmic flexibility put him on a par with saxophone and trumpet soloists.

Over the years that followed, as well as playing in Davis’s nonet, he was to make several outstanding recordings as a freelance, in particular with the trio led by Bud Powell, in which Latin rhythms were explored in Un Poco Loco and breakneck tempi played with ease when Powell’s trio accompanied the saxophonist Sonny Stitt. But it was the quintet that Roach led with Clifford Brown from 1954-56 that produced his finest recordings from the period, which are widely regarded as his own best work.

In this band, the polyrhythmic texture of his 1940s playing gave way to a simpler, more accessible style, and first with Harold Land playing the tenor saxophone, and then Sonny Rollins, the group made a series of highly significant discs, including such perennial standards as Brown’s composition Joy Spring.

Roach was devastated when Brown and the band’s pianist, Bud Powell’s younger brother Richie, were killed in a car accident in June 1956.

He continued to work with Rollins, appearing on several albums, including the famous calypso recording of Rollins’s St Thomas on Saxophone Colossus, although he was still suffering from depression, and was fighting alcoholism.

His recovery was marked by growing political activism. He and Mingus organised a rival festival to the official one at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1960, offering free admission, and proposing a better deal for the participating musicians.

He also collaborated the same year with the writer Oscar Brown Jr onWe Insist! The Freedom Now Suite, in which Roach’s wife then, the singer Abbey Lincoln, delivered a series of Brown’s stark and polemical lyrics within some highly original compositional structures by Roach.

She credited him with giving her the confidence to explore her own musical personality both on that record and on her masterpiece from the following year, Straight Ahead.

She said: “I found out how wonderful it is to be a black woman. And I learnt from Max that I should always sound how I feel, and that whatever I do, I should do it definitely.”

His increasing musical radicalism was symbolised by his recordings for solo drums, such as Drums Unlimited from 1966, which he followed four years later with the percussion ensemble M’Boom Re, in which ten musicians played assorted idiophones such as xylophones and marimbas, steel pans, chimes and bells.

We Insist! triggered more compositions from Roach, and he was to spend much of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s working with choreographers and playwrights, including Sam Shepard, their collaboration garnering an Obie (Off Broadway) Award.

He also began teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which he continued until the 1990s, although latterly he preferred to play as an artist-in-residence.

His own quartet, with the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and saxophonist Odean Pope, was established in the 1970s, and (usually with Tyrone Brown on bass) continued until the start of this century, making numerous discs in their own right, as well as with Maxine Roach’s Uptown String Quartet, a project that he thoroughly enjoyed. He threw similar energy into the Beijing Trio, a Chinese-American band led by the pianist John Jang.

Roach was popular in Britain, and appeared as recently as 1999 at the Barbican with his quartet and with a musician who had become a regular duo partner over the years, the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. He also made acclaimed duo discs with Dizzy Gillespie, and with the expatriate pianist Mal Waldron.

Roach was the subject of a biographical film by Geoffrey Haydon and Dennis Marks for the pioneering Channel 4 music series Repercussions, and he also participated in an extended Radio 3 documentary series about his life, Drum Beats, presented by Charles Fox.

Roach finally stopped touring in 2000 but continued to write and record for a further couple of years until the onset of a debilitating illness.

He is survived by his daughter Maxine, two further daughters and two sons.

Max Roach, jazz drummer, composer and bandleader, was born on January 10, 1924. He died on August 16, 2007, aged 83