Paul Bley obituary

If jazz is a music of constant change, then the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, who has died aged 83, was one of the most steadfast proponents of that demanding characteristic. “Anything you play twice is once too much,” he said, in one of the aphorisms that seemed to come to him as naturally as the endlessly varied keyboard phrases, each seemingly fresh-minted, that he created throughout a professional career that began when he was in his teens.

His lifelong rejection of overtly romantic, sentimental, dramatic or otherwise ingratiating gestures may have limited the size of his audience, but it made a profound impression on a generation of his fellow pianists, from the hugely successful Keith Jarrett to such figures of comparatively recent significance as Ethan Iverson and Aaron Parks. Himself influenced in his early days by the bebop master Bud Powell, Bley set off on a resolutely individual path that would lead him to collaborations with many leading figures and to participation in some of the pivotal groups of modern jazz.

Bley’s music was never short of romance or drama, but those qualities generally came obliquely or in disguise, filtered through an extraordinary sensibility, at once refined and adventurous, the strategic use of silence indicating its reflective – although never passive – nature. His club and concert performances around the world, with regular or ad hoc musical partners or as a solo improviser, were accompanied by a willingness to record prolifically, enabling his admirers to keep abreast of his evolution.

His repertoire depended heavily on the compositions of two of the women with whom he had strong relationships: Carla Bley, his first wife, and Annette Peacock. Each of them provided skeletal but highly suggestive frameworks – such as Carla Bley’s tunes Vashkar and Ida Lupino and Peacock’s Blood and Nothing Ever Was, Anyway – that he could explore time and again without ever exhausting their possibilities.

Born in Montreal, he was adopted in infancy by Joe Bley, who owned an embroidery factory, and his wife, Betty (nee Marcovitch). The couple split up when he was seven. Many years later, Paul discovered that his childhood nanny, a young French-Canadian woman named Lucie, of whom he became very fond and from whom he was separated by the divorce, had been his birth mother, and that he was the product of his father’s affair.

Encouraged by his adoptive mother, he took piano lessons with a travelling teacher from the Paris Conservatory and subsequently studied at McGill University and the Quebec Conservatory. Steeped from an early age in a love of jazz, at 16 he was invited by Oscar Peterson to deputise for him in a Montreal club. He co-founded the Montreal Jazz Workshop, some of whose shows were broadcast by the CBC, and at 18 he had the opportunity to accompany such giants as Lester Young and Charlie Parker.

During his teens his mother had given him money and told him to go to New York to see if he liked it. In 1953, while dividing his time between the two cities, he was invited by Charles Mingus to supervise a recording by the bassist’s 10-piece band. In return he was given his own first session as a leader, in a trio with Mingus on bass and Art Blakey on drums, the result released on Mingus’s own label, Debut. But it would be almost 10 years before a pair of albums for the Savoy company, with a trio completed by Steve Swallow on bass and Pete La Roca on drums, certified the presence of real originality.

In the meantime he had married a young Swedish-American woman whom he met while she was selling cigarettes at Birdland, the famous New York jazz club, and who gradually changed her name from Lovella May Borg to Karen Borg to Carla Bley. In 1956 they moved to California, where Bley secured a regular gig leading a quartet at the Hillcrest Club on Washington Boulevard, in a black section of Los Angeles. After a year or so the arrival of the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the trumpeter Don Cherry changed not just the line-up of the group, which became a quintet completed by the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Billy Higgins, but its entire approach. The band’s exploration of Coleman’s open-ended tunes was captured by Carla on a small tape-recorder; many years later an album was released.

Leaving behind what would become Coleman’s epoch-making quartet, Bley returned to New York, where he and Swallow joined the clarinettist Jimmy Giuffre to form a trio pioneering a form of semi-free chamber jazz. He played in a similar group led by the trumpeter Don Ellis, was briefly reunited with Mingus, had a featured role on a big-band album titled Jazz in the Space Age (1960) by the composer George Russell, and recorded with Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins at the 1963 Newport jazz festival.

In 1964 he and Carla, from whom he was by then separated, also took part in the October Revolution in Jazz, an expression of the desire of a group of adventurous young musicians – including Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor – to confront the shortcomings of the commercial music industry by taking their destiny into their own hands.

“I think all record companies should be run by a musician, just as you wouldn’t trust your health to an electrician,” he once said. The October Revolution fizzled out, but in 1970 Bley formed a fruitful and enduring alliance with Manfred Eicher, a former classical bassist who was setting up his own label, ECM, in Munich. Eicher released a couple of trio tapes that Bley had already made in New York before producing the first of a long string of sessions which would result in some of the pianist’s finest work, often featuring the bassist Gary Peacock and the drummer Paul Motian.

In the early 70s he and Annette Peacock, Gary Peacock’s former wife, visited Europe, creating a stir through their pioneering use in improvised music of an early synthesiser given to them by the inventor Robert Moog. The British saxophonist Evan Parker, who later recorded with Bley for ECM in a trio completed by the bassist Barre Phillips, remembers Bley manning the door at Ronnie Scott’s club for the Sunday concerts held by the London Musicians’ Co-operative.

With the video artist Carol Goss, whom he later married, Bley set up his own label, Improvising Artists Inc (IAI), to release material by himself and others. As well as his continuing output for ECM, he also recorded for SteepleChase in Denmark, Hat Hut in Switzerland, Owl in France and Soul Note in Italy, including albums wholly devoted to the compositions of his former partners (Paul Plays Carla in 1991 and Annette in 1992). The Giuffre trio reunited in 1989 for tours and further recordings. Two years ago Bley’s last ECM release, Play Blue, presented a solo recital recorded in an Oslo church in 2008 and indicative of a man whose technical gifts, distaste for the obvious and feeling for a special kind of unsparing beauty were unimpaired.

He is survived by Carol, and by three daughters, Solo, Vanessa and Angelica.