Henry Jones Jr. was born July 31, 1918, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, where his father worked as a Baptist deacon and a lumber inspector. He was one of ten children in a household where his mother, Olivia, sang and two older sisters studied piano, and he was the eldest of the three brothers who became major jazz musicians: the trumpeter and composer Thad Jones, born 1923, and the drummer Elvin Jones, born 1927. Jones took formal classical lessons from an early age with a teacher named Pauline McCann and named Bach, Chopin, Debussy and Ravel as the composers who shaped his technique. His father regarded jazz as the devil's work, which did not stop him: hearing Art Tatum's 1933 record of "Tiger Rag," he assumed he was listening to three pianists at once. By thirteen he was working locally around Michigan and Ohio, and in 1944, while playing territory bands in Grand Rapids and Lansing, he met saxophonist Lucky Thompson, who brought him to New York to work at the Onyx Club with Hot Lips Page.

New York put him inside the bebop revolution at exactly the right moment. Jones went to hear Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk systematically and rebuilt his playing around what he heard, while paying the rent with John Kirby, Howard McGhee, Coleman Hawkins, Andy Kirk and Billy Eckstine. Hawkins recorded Jones's composition "Angel Face" in 1947, and in the autumn of that year Jones joined Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic touring package, which is where he became Ella Fitzgerald's pianist. He accompanied her from 1948 to 1953. He also cut sides with Charlie Parker, including "The Song Is You" from the Now's the Time material recorded in December 1952 with Teddy Kotick and Max Roach, and worked engagements with Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman, playing on the small-group sessions that closed out Shaw's recording career. From roughly 1954 he was the house pianist at Savoy Records, a job that produced his own trio album with Wendell Marshall and Kenny Clarke in August 1955 and put him on Savoy dates with Donald Byrd, Herbie Mann and Bobby Jaspar. On March 9, 1958, at Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack studio, he took the piano chair on Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else, with Miles Davis on trumpet: the most widely heard record he ever played on.

From 1959 through 1975 Jones held a staff pianist's job at CBS studios, which he got through the singer Andy Williams. It paid a salary and carried benefits that working jazz musicians almost never had, and it kept him in television studios for The Garry Moore Show, The Jackie Gleason Show and The Ed Sullivan Show rather than on the road. Two pieces of that period escaped television. In 1961 he played on Kenyon Hopkins's score for The Hustler, including a solo feature called "Derby Time," and on May 19, 1962, he was the pianist behind Marilyn Monroe when she sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. Jones counted the performance at sixteen bars, eight of "Happy Birthday" and eight of "Thanks for the Memory," and said they had rehearsed those sixteen bars for eight hours. He was also on the bandstand on February 7, 1966, when the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra played its first Monday night at the Village Vanguard, tapes of which surfaced fifty years later as All My Yesterdays, and he held the piano chair on the band's studio debut, Presenting Thad Jones/Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra, recorded in May 1966. Roland Hanna took over the chair later that year. Jones's own leader dates thinned out during the CBS decade to a handful: Here's Love (1963) with Kenny Burrell, Milt Hinton and Elvin Jones, This Is Ragtime Now! (1964) and Happenings (1966) with Oliver Nelson's orchestra.

The comeback came fast once the staff job ended. In 1978 Jones became pianist and music director of the Broadway revue Ain't Misbehavin', built on Fats Waller's songs, which opened at the Longacre Theatre on May 9 and won that year's Tony for Best Musical: for a great many listeners it was the first time his name registered at all. At the same time the Japanese label East Wind put him in front of a trio with Ron Carter and Tony Williams, the rhythm section of Miles Davis's second quintet, and East Wind's A&R staff gave the band a name in 1976: the Great Jazz Trio. The group's first record, Love for Sale, cut May 22, 1976, used Buster Williams on bass; from there the Carter and Williams lineup held, and the two nights it taped at the Village Vanguard on February 19 and 20, 1977 produced At the Village Vanguard, Vol. 2 and, twenty-three years later, At the Village Vanguard Again. Around the trio Jones cut leader dates at a rate he had never managed before: 'Bop Redux (Muse, 1977) and I Remember You (Black and Blue, 1977) between them drew three Grammy nominations, Just for Fun and Tiptoe Tapdance went to Fantasy Studios in Berkeley for the Galaxy label, and Our Delights, recorded in a single day on January 28, 1978, started a long two-piano partnership with his fellow Detroit-schooled pianist Tommy Flanagan.

Through the 1980s and 1990s the pattern held: piano duets, trios and a steady stream of Japanese and European sessions. He recorded two-piano albums with John Lewis, Flanagan again and George Shearing, a bass-and-piano duo with Red Mitchell at Van Gelder's in December 1987, and the trio date issued both as The Oracle and as Interface with Dave Holland and Billy Higgins in March 1989. The Great Jazz Trio kept turning over: Eddie Gomez and Al Foster by 1980, Jimmy Cobb in Foster's place from 1982, Mads Vinding and Billy Hart for the five Great Standards volumes on Alfa Jazz between 1988 and 1990, then George Mraz and Roy Haynes for Flowers for Lady Day in September 1991. A run of Verve albums beginning in 1992 gave him his strongest late-period catalog: the solo Handful of Keys, a record of his brother's compositions called Upon Reflection: The Music of Thad Jones cut in February 1993 with Mraz and Elvin Jones, the Malian collaboration Sarala with Cheick Tidiane Seck, and two albums of spirituals, hymns and folk songs in duo with bassist Charlie Haden. The first of those, Steal Away, recorded in Montreal in June 1994, drew two more Grammy nominations.

He worked at that level into his nineties. For My Father (2005), West of 5th (2006) with Christian McBride and Jimmy Cobb, the Blue Note live duo Kids with saxophonist Joe Lovano recorded at Dizzy's Club in April 2006, and the vocal accompaniment album You Are There with Roberta Gambarini all came out of his last five years, alongside further Great Jazz Trio records with John Patitucci and Jack DeJohnette, then Patitucci and Omar Hakim. At seventy-eight he described a practice regimen of three or four hours of scales and exercises a day followed by sight-reading. He made a two-piano recording of Ellington and Strayhorn's "Tonk" with Bill Charlap in 2007 and played a two-piano concert with Brad Mehldau in Montreal in 2008. The National Endowment for the Arts had named him a Jazz Master in 1989; the ASCAP Jazz Living Legend Award followed in 2003, the National Medal of Arts in 2008 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. His last session, cut at Sony Music Studios in Tokyo on February 24, 2010 with the trio plus Roy Hargrove, was released as Last Recording. Hank Jones passed away at Calvary Hospital Hospice in the Bronx on May 16, 2010, aged 91, survived by his wife Theodosia.

Jones built a style out of two things that rarely sit together: a conservatory-grade touch inherited from Bach, Chopin and Ravel, and a bebop vocabulary he taught himself in New York clubs after 1944 by listening to Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. What came out was an unhurried, evenly weighted, harmonically dense manner that made him the most employable accompanist in the music for six decades. He described his own aim plainly: "each note should have a soul of its own," and said he tried to stay near the melody rather than go "out into the deep water." That restraint cost him public profile and earned him almost unanimous respect from other pianists. Oscar Peterson traced his own roots to Art Tatum and to Jones and grouped him with Bill Evans and Cedar Walton as jazz's great long-line players; André Previn called Jones his favorite pianist "regardless of idiom"; George Shearing, who recorded a two-piano album with him, called him "one of the most underrated pianists in the business" and praised the beautiful deep sound, clarity and economy; Keith Jarrett called his playing "tasty and stimulating." Critics grouped him with Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and Roland Hanna as a Detroit school of pianists defined by sophisticated harmony and tasteful accompaniment, though Jones was the oldest of them by more than a decade and the one who reached New York first. Kenny Barron, Bill Charlap, Eric Reed and Geoffrey Keezer have all named him as an influence, and his own repertoire kept looping back to the stride and swing pianists he grew up on, above all Fats Waller, whose music he played nightly on Broadway in 1978 and recorded solo for Verve in 1992.