TALL, white-haired and dignified, Don Alias looked more like the doctor he once studied to become than the most sought-after percussionist in the jazz world.

Lured away from his studies in medicine in Boston to join a band called Los Muchachos, Alias went on to become the percussionist of choice for a vast range of musicians, ranging from the singers Eartha Kitt, Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell to such jazz luminaries as Miles Davis, Chick Corea and Pat Metheny. He also worked in the rock world, with Sting and with Blood, Sweat and Tears.

Specialising in the conga drums, Alias brought subtle Afro-Cuban rhythms to many of the groups he worked with, but he also played the conventional drum set, notably in the jazz-rock trio he co-led with the bassist Gene Perla, called Stone Alliance.

He usually found it easy to work alongside other drummers. “A drummer would see you coming through the door of a club with the conga drum and cower at the very idea of you sitting in,” he told The Times during his own band’s UK tour in 2000. “But I had a tactic to help me get ‘in’ with any band’s regular drummer. I’d wait to hear whether they were familiar with what you might call the language of drums before I even tried to sit in. If they were, we’d get along fine.”

Born in Harlem, where he heard the music of Mongo Santamaria and Arsenio Rodriguez as he grew up, Alias was self-taught, apart from a few drum lessons from the local percussionist Sunny Morgan. As a teenager he played congas to accompany dance classes, but his career took off when he moved to medical school in Boston and met the conga player Bill Fitch, who was his passport to the city’s lively after-hours jam sessions. Alias’s first professional job was playing the drums for Eartha Kitt at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, where she opened for Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. Kitt rushed her band off to a restaurant for oysters and champagne. Alias — who had never tasted either — was being violently sick outside when Gillespie arrived and suggested he’d have been better off staying and sitting in with his band.

However, it was not Gillespie but Nina Simone who gave Alias his big break, and for three years Alias was her drummer and music director. He came to the attention of the jazz world when Miles Davis hired him to play on the Bitches Brew album in 1969. He contributed conga rhythms to the disc, but on the track called Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, the young Alias stopped the band, and took over the drums from Jack DeJohnette to create one of the most memorable rhythmic accompaniments in jazz.

He worked with Davis on the road for a year, and later appeared on the 1972 album On the Corner. However, when Alias was reunited on record with Davis in 1989 for Amandla, the trumpeter did not bother to come to the studio, but rehearsed the rhythm section over the telephone until they had put down the requisite backing tracks.

By this time, however, Alias had become a highly respected and widely experienced player in many genres. He provided the rhythmic backdrop to Joni Mitchell’s albums Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Mingus and Shadows and Light, touring during 1979. He was friends with the mercurial bassist Jaco Pastorius, appearing on his live solo albums and alongside him in the group Weather Report on the disc Black Market. In the early 1980s he played frequently with Chick Corea, notably on the Touchstone album, and he went on to play with Carla Bley, working in various groups from her 1987 sextet to her Very Big Band of 1990.

By this time Alias had formed a close association with the saxophonist Michael Brecker, and the two men toured the UK three times, first in Don Grolnick’s 1995 sextet, then with Herbie Hancock’s New Standard band in 1996, and finally in 2000 with Alias’s own group, which included both Brecker brothers, Alex Acuna, Giovanni Hildalgo and Steve Berrios.

Touring was a pleasurable pastime for Alias, but his real contribution during the 1980s and 1990s was a first-call studio musician. Among those who added his dynamic drumming to their albums were Uri Caine, Barbara Dennerlein, Marty Ehrlich, Charlie Haden, Joe Lovano, John McLaughlin, Pat Metheny and David Sanborn. He remained active as a percussionist until shortly before his death.

He is survived by his companion, Melanie Futorian, and by a son and a daughter.

Don Alias, jazz percussionist and bandleader, was born on December 25, 1939. He died on March 28, 2006, aged 66.