Larry Willis, a prolific pianist who nimbly traversed genres over a five-decade career, died on Sunday in Baltimore . He was 76.

The bassist Blake Meister , who played with him often, said the cause was a pulmonary hemorrhage.

Mr. Willis became a trusted accompanist for figures like the bebop-and-beyond saxophonist Jackie McLean, the South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela and the eclectic composer and arranger Carla Bley. He played in the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears, and later in Jerry Gonzalez’s Fort Apache Band, a pioneering Latin-jazz ensemble .

He ultimately took part in sessions for hundreds of albums, including nearly two dozen of his own.

Raised in Harlem, Mr. Willis didn’t start playing piano until his late teens, but once he did, he soared. Immersed in a thriving New York music scene, he worked with some of jazz’s most prominent figures before branching out into Latin music, fusion and occasionally free jazz. The breadth of his career, he later said, reflected the world in which he’d been raised.

“Harlem was a melting pot of a lot of different ethnic people,” he said in a 2010 interview for the website All About Jazz. “There are so many valid schools of thought under the umbrella of this music that we call jazz.”