This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.

Wallace Roney, a virtuoso trumpeter whose term as Miles Davis’s only true protégé opened onto a prominent career in jazz, died on Tuesday in Paterson, N.J. He was 59.

The cause was complications of the coronavirus, his fiancée, Dawn Jones, said.

By the time he linked up with Davis, Mr. Roney was already a leading voice in what came to be called the Young Lions movement, a coterie of young musicians devoted to bringing jazz back into line with its midcentury sound. And he was already associated — sometimes distressingly so — with Davis’s legacy. Many dismissed him as a musical clone: ravishingly talented but lacking the necessary distance from his idol to claim creative agency.

Yet as his career went on, Mr. Roney managed to neutralize most of those criticisms. His nuanced understanding of Davis’s playing — its harmonic and rhythmic wirings as well as its smoldering tone — was only part of a vast musical ken. His own style bespoke an investment in the entire lineage of jazz trumpet playing.

Most of the ideas in Mr. Roney’s compositions began at the center of jazz’s mainstream language and cut a path outward, often by way of funk, hip-hop, pop, Brazilian or Afro-Caribbean music.