London Scene 60's and 70's

The jazz composer Graham Collier liked quoting an old friend's description of watching him handle a big band – like someone "directing 14 Jackson Pollocks". Collier, who has died aged 74, was not a monumental composer by the standards of colossi such as Duke Ellington. But if he was a step behind, he was a quietly combative, thoughtful, subtle and often eloquent practitioner, able to write complex, yet richly harmonised and lyrical scores in shifting time-signatures, which nonetheless liberated rather than cramped improvising soloists.

He was also a gifted educator, a polemicist, a critic of the pursuit of ephemeral fashions and the instigator of initiatives that accelerated the independence of jazz in his homeland. The British scene was an also-ran on the world stage when Collier arrived, but it became a big-hitting international contender during his lifetime – and the Tynesider laid down some pioneering markers as part of that change.

Collier was the first Briton to graduate from the jazz course at Berklee College of Music, Boston. In 1968 he became the first composer to receive an Arts Council bursary for a jazz piece, his Workpoints project, at a time when many in the arts establishment thought jazz was a commercial music undeserving of public subsidy. Many British jazz artists have since been funded because of Collier's mix of perseverance, belief, political nous and bolshieness.

He was an influential member of the London-based jazz generation of the late 1960s, fired by a new confidence that contemporary composition could finally be independent of its American models. Collier also initiated a jazz course at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and was the conservatoire's first jazz director and subsequently professor, from 1986 until his retirement in 1999.

He is perhaps best known, however, for running a workshop for unknown young musicians, including the pianist Django Bates and saxophonist Iain Ballamy, in London in 1984, from which sprang Loose Tubes, one of the most creative and influential jazz orchestras founded in Britain.

Collier was born in Tynemouth, Tyne and Wear. He played the trumpet and then double bass with an army band from 1954, serving for three years in Hong Kong. In 1961 he won a scholarship funded by the American jazz magazine DownBeat, attending Berklee under the inspirational composition teacher Herb Pomeroy. On graduation in 1963, he toured the US as a bassist with Jimmy Dorsey's swing band before returning to Britain to found the first version of an ensemble devoted to his own compositions, Graham Collier Music.

The group was to change regularly, in size and personnel, but it included some of the finest soloists on the London scene of the mid-60s, including John Dankworth's sideman Kenny Wheeler, the young Barbadian trumpeter Harry Beckett (who was to become a lifelong Collier associate), and Mike Westbrook's sax virtuoso discovery John Surman. Collier's later groups maintained the quality of that first line-up over the years, his bands including the composer/pianist Karl Jenkins, the trombonist and bandleader Mike Gibbs, the saxophonists Art Themen, Chris Biscoe and James Allsopp, and many more.

Collier's early groups made innovative recordings that have become cult classics, including the live sets from 1968 and 1975 issued on the US Cuneiform label under the title Workpoints. These pieces revealed his devotion to Ellington, Mingus and the Miles Davis/Gil Evans bands, but recast in a distinctively European harmonic language, and explored Britain's newly emerging crossovers of jazz and rock. The albums Down Another Road (1969) and Songs for My Father (1970) saw these ingredients mixed increasingly effectively.

Collier's career took a further leap when he was invited to form an international big band for the 1983 Bracknell Jazz Festival, and wrote the evocative and subtly shaded composition Hoarded Dreams. The big-band experience (and a conviction that the UK's jazz renaissance was producing a rising but underused generation of talented newcomers) led Collier to form a workshop orchestra in 1984. Bates and Ballamy were among the first recruits. Though the subsequent emergence of Loose Tubes as a transforming force in European jazz composition was to happen as much in spite of Collier's guidance as because of it, the mentor of these unruly charges had undoubtedly talent-spotted a group with the originality to change, and keep changing, the way jazz sounded.

In the same period, Collier also conceived a new six-year jazz degree course at the Sibelius Institute in Helsinki, along with his initiatives at the Royal Academy of Music. In 1987 he was appointed OBE and two years later participated in the founding of the International Association of Schools of Jazz, serving on its board for the next nine years. In 1994 Collier produced the report Jazz Education in America for a Winston Churchill fellowship, and the findings led to the launch of the educational journal Jazz Changes, with Collier as co-editor.

His international commissions also burgeoned during these years, and he was to compose for the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra and Germany's NDR Big Band, and for ensembles from saxophone quartets to symphony orchestras. In the mid-1990s, following a BBC commission for the London Jazz Festival, he developed the ad hoc big band the Jazz Ensemble, with a core lineup augmented by guests. It produced two albums, Charles River Fragments (1995) and The Third Colour (1999). Collier's deepening compositional resources also brought him commissions for the theatre, documentary and fiction films, and radio drama – including the acclaimed BBC adaptation of Josef Škvorecký's novella The Bass Saxophone (1989, the winner of a Sony award).

Collier wrote six books including Interaction, Opening Up the Jazz Ensemble (1995) and The Jazz Composer: Moving Music Off the Paper (2009). On leaving the Royal Academy of Music in 1999, he went to live in Ronda in southern Spain, and in 2008 moved with his partner, John Gill, to an island in the Aegean Sea.

When I interviewed him for the Guardian in 1997, Collier commented on that year's composition The Third Colour, which reflected his long fascination with painting and its conceptual implications for music-making. "In abstract painting," he said, "the notion of the 'the third colour' is supposed to represent the connection between the lines. I've been working all my life between what's improvised and what's written, so maybe it's appropriate. I think the nature of improvisation is often misunderstood, inside and outside jazz. To me there are three kinds of improvising. Solo, which is obvious; textural, which is what a rhythm section often does … and structural improvising, which the bandleader or conductor might organise, deciding during the performance to have the band play the sections of the piece in a different order, or play five choruses instead of four, or whatever. What all this amounts to is that as the leader of this kind of band you can seize the moment." It's a sentiment that energised this major enabler of British jazz throughout his life.

Collier is survived by his partner.

• James Graham Collier, composer, born 21 February 1937; died 9 September 2011