Stanley Cowell, a pianist, composer, record-label impresario and educator who brought a technician’s attention to detail and a theorist’s sophistication to his more than 50-year career as a jazz bandleader, died Friday in Dover, Del. He was 79.

Cowell was among the first jazz musicians to make prominent use of the kalimba, a thumb piano from southeastern Africa. In his later decades he worked often with a digital sound-design program, Kyma, allowing him to alter the pitch and texture of an acoustic piano’s sound.

In 1971, together with trumpeter Charles Tolliver, Cowell founded Strata-East Records, a pioneering institution in jazz and the broader Black Arts Movement. It would release a steady run of pathbreaking music over the coming decade, becoming one of the most successful Black-run labels of its time.

Cowell and Tolliver met in the late 1960s as members of drummer Max Roach’s ensemble. After recording the classic album with Roach, “Members, Don’t Git Weary” in 1968, they formed a quartet called Music Inc., which released its debut LP, “The Ringer,” on Polydor in 1970.

Inspired by the Black musicians’ collectives that had recently sprouted up in cities across the country, and by the artist-run Strata label in Detroit, Cowell and Tolliver founded Strata-East. Their second album together, “Music Inc.,” with the quartet fleshed out into a large ensemble, was the label’s first release.

Over the coming decade, Strata-East would release dozens of albums with a similar goal at heart, including some gemlike LPs by Cowell: “Musa: Ancestral Streams” (1974), a solo album of understated breadth; “Regeneration” (1975), an odyssey equally inspired by pop music and pan-Africanism; and a pair of singular albums with the Piano Choir, a group of seven pianists, “Handscapes 1” (1973) and “Handscapes 2” (1975).

Cowell was also becoming one of New York’s most in-demand side musicians, known for his vast command of the jazz language. In the coming decade he would play an integral role in the Heath Brothers band and groups led by the saxophonists Arthur Blythe and Art Pepper and the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson.

After becoming a full-time music professor in the 1980s, Cowell eventually stepped back from public performances and recordings.

His quartet’s appearance at the Village Vanguard in 2015 was his first weeklong engagement in New York in nearly two decades.

Stanley Allen Cowell was born in Toledo, Ohio, on May 5, 1941, to Stanley and Willie Hazel (Lytle) Cowell, who kept a wide variety of music playing in the house at all times. The couple ran a series of businesses, including a motel that was among the only places in Toledo where touring Black musicians could stay. Many artists became family friends, including the stride piano master Art Tatum, himself a Toledo native.

During a visit to the family home when Stanley was 6, Tatum played a version of the show tune “You Took Advantage of Me” that Cowell would never forget. When he recorded his first album in 1969, “Blues for the Viet Cong,” he included a dazzling stride rendition of “You Took Advantage of Me” alongside his own forward-charging originals.

As a child, Cowell played and composed constantly. By the time he arrived at the Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio at age 17, he had already written a number of pieces. He studied in Austria, then at the University of Michigan, where he received a graduate degree in classical piano while working six nights a week in a jazz trio.