Jackie McLean, who died Friday at 73, was a celebrated saxophonist, educator, and National Endowment of the Arts-designated Jazz Master, and developed one of the most distinctive and recognizable sounds in the history of the saxophone.

As a jazz musician, McLean was an improviser, a composer, and a bandleader, and was outstanding in all these capacities. As a saxophonist, McLean was one of the greatest musicians ever to play the instrument, and relentlessly strove to improve his sound.

As a teacher, he was one of the first major jazz players to become involved in academia, and he played a significant role in the long-term success of jazz education.

McLean had the advantage of growing up surrounded by jazz. His father, John McLean, who died when McLean was just 7, was a professional guitarist with various bands, and his stepfather (from the age of 12) owned a jazz record shop on 141st Street. He grew up in Harlem during the swing era and the years of the transition into bebop. “Most kids collected pictures of baseball players, and things like that, but I collected pictures of Prez [Lester Young],” he told A.B. Spellman in the 1966 book “Four Lives in the Bebop Business.” “I really wanted a tenor before I heard Bird [Charlie Parker].” He later added, “But when I first heard Bird, that was it, I knew that that was the way I wanted the alto to sound.”

Parker was a mentor, as were Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and his close friend Sonny Rollins was a senior at Benjamin Franklin High School when McLean was a freshman.

McLean would have been a legendary player for his work as a sideman alone: He served under three of the greatest ensemble leaders in jazz history: Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and Charles Mingus. Around 1948, the precocious McLean (age 16 and with a son, Rene, age 2), made his first record, playing baritone with saxist and composer Charlie Singleton on the R &B hit “Camel Walkin’.” Like so many musicians of his time and place, he had already developed an addiction to heroin. He began recording in earnest in 1951 alongside Mr. Rollins as a member of Davis’s band. Davis was only 25 and already grooming the second generation of beboppers.

The young McLean built his early reputation alongside Davis, working with the trumpeter until 1955. McLean appeared sporadically with Mingus in an early edition of the great bassist-composer’s Jazz Workshop, playing on one of his most celebrated albums, “Pithecanthropus Erectus.” He worked with Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for less than a year in 1956-57, but in that time the band recorded at least a half a dozen albums for nearly as many labels.

In these same years, McLean began recording under his own name for Prestige Records; on these early efforts he sounds like a talented player who has yet to reach his potential, and is still very much in thrall to Parker. For a while it looked as if McLean would not develop any further: He was repeatedly arrested for drug possession and spent most of 1958 incarcerated.

In 1959, McLean began to turn his life around: He began recording a series of classic albums for Blue Note Records, and was also given a lifeline in the chance to appear on Broadway in a drama with music about the drug-and-jazz scene titled “The Connection” (which was also made into a movie). Most importantly, with the support of his wife, Dollie, McLean began to conquer his substance abuse problem.

The decade McLean spent at Blue Note was his zenith as a recording artist: He cut nearly two dozen albums for the label as a leader, and appeared on nearly that many as a sideman. The Blue Note albums have been so influential on student musicians, that McLean would be considered a major force in shaping young talents even if he had never taught.

McLean wrote in 1962, “My personal dilemma was getting away from the conventional and much overused chord changes.” He started with a bebop or hard-bop base – and was also a gifted blues and ballad player – and in these years he explored the idea of playing jazz with scales and modes rather than traditional harmonic sequences. He also was paying close attention to the free jazz experiments of Ornette Coleman, and Mr. Coleman even joined McLean as a guest star – playing trumpet – on his 1967 “New and Old Gospel.”

McLean recorded intermittently after Blue Note, but much of his energy from 1968 on was devoted to education. He began teaching at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and eventually became the school’s artistic director. He founded the Artists Collective, an organization to help inner-city youth by instructing them in performing arts.

McLean continued to record and tour internationally, and starting in the 1980s, he worked regularly with his son Rene McLean, who plays saxophone and flute.

By the 1990s, fans who knew his classic recordings and then heard him live at the Village Vanguard or the Iridium were often shocked by how sharp his tone had become.

“My life has been sweet and sour, bittersweet, and I’m interpreting my experience. I’m a sugar-free saxophonist,” he once said.

John Lenwood McLean Jr.

Born May 17, 1932, in New York City; died March 28 at his home in Hartford, Conn.; survived by his wife, Dollie McLean; sons Rene McLean and Vernone McLean; a daughter, Melonae McLean; five grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

Mr. Friedwald covers jazz for The New York Sun.