The pianist McCoy Tyner’s impact on music is usually explained through his relationship to John Coltrane, a childhood friend who became his boss in one of the most significant ensembles in American history. But the story of Mr. Tyner, who died on Friday, is also the story of a bandleader and composer whose granite style remained intact even as he tracked the music’s developments, from bebop into free jazz.

By the time he left Coltrane’s group in 1965, Mr. Tyner’s piano had become one of the distinctive forces in jazz: His pot-stirring left hand pounded heavy bass notes, then topped them off with roving stacks of harmony. His right hand’s brisk, zipping phrases made it just as recognizable as the left, if not quite as iconic.

The Coltrane quartet modeled a new kind of ancient thinking about music: as a collective ritual, one that lived by a pledge of mutual independence as well as support. “It is all a matter of giving the soloist more freedom to explore harmonically,” Mr. Tyner said in 1963, when the quartet was in its prime. “Nevertheless, there is a foundation and a point of return. We all know where we are working from.”