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Jan Hammer is traditionally given short shrift in jazz histories because of his shift into rock-based music and ultimately, his soundtrack work for Miami Vice, which brought him the most notoriety, not to mention moolah.

Considering how capable Jan Hammer was in so many music genres, it’s ironic that the one he chose to concentrate his energies the most on was his weakest. When Hammer turned his back on formal complexity and tried his hand at a combination of R&B and rock, the results were mediocre at best.

Terrible albums like Black Sheep and Oh, Yeah? tend to cast doubt on Jan Hammer’s talent and significance, but the fact is that Jan Hammer was a protean and unique keyboard stylist. There hasn’t been one similar before or since. His trademark was a rhythmic precision and a composer’s ear for laying down contrary harmonic concepts on top of whatever genre he was filtering through his sensibility at the time. Hammer could do blues, funk, Latin, jazz, and rock authentically, but in his best work, he burrowed deep into the DNA of the music and left his mark.

Take his acoustic piano work on G.G. or What’s Up – That’s It for example, both post bop tunes recorded with Elvin Jones in the late 60s, right after Jan Hammer arrived in the United States from his native Czeckoslavakia. On G.G., he alternates between swift arpeggiations that outline the harmony and extremely deliberate and deceptively simple melodies. He sounds like no one else. On What’s Up – That’s It, he startles us with a completely authentic Latin ostinato. On the solo, again, there are the deliberate, simple melodies that unexpectedly migrate into altered harmony. Listen to the comping behind his melodies, and how completely it contrasts with the melody.

Hammer continued to exhibit these characteristics in an electric context with the Mahavishnu Orchestra and his little heard work with flautist Jeremy Steig and reed player Steve Grossman, but probably the most complete flowering of his aesthetic can be heard on his solo masterpiece, The First Seven Days, which is mostly scored for various keyboards, augmented with percussion and violin. It’s here that his composing and arranging sensibility can be discerned most clearly.

Taking nothing away from Jan Hammer’s work with Jeff Beck on the classic fusion album Wired, probably the best setting for Hammer as an instrumentalist was on Elvin Jones’ On The Mountain. Really, it’s an Elvin Jones date only in name. All of the tunes were written either by Hammer or the bassist, Gene Perla. Hammer’s playing on this set has all of his virtues: sensitivity, far reaching harmonic knowledge, originality, and ferocity.

Jan Hammer was only a serious musician for maybe ten years before he devoted himself to more egalitarian pursuits, finally trailing off into silence, but it would be a mistake to underestimate his contribution to jazz. He would have no imitators, and next to no influence on musicians of future generations, but when you combine his early solo albums with his contributions as a sideman, you’re left with an estimable body of work.

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