The Yorkshire-born pianist Howard Riley, who has died aged 81, was a leading figure among the first generation of European jazz musicians to prioritise creating an idiom of their own out of the language developed by the American musicians they had admired and studied.

Riley brought to the task a knowledge of the advanced techniques pioneered by contemporary classical composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penderecki and Luciano Berio. But there was no straining for effect as he applied that knowledge to music with improvisation at its core, and his work was always most profoundly marked by his love and understanding of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and other great jazz musicians.

It was with the lineup of the conventional piano-bass-drums jazz trio that he first made his reputation at the end of the 1960s. In later decades he also became renowned for his solo performances and for duo recitals with empathetic fellow pianists, including Jaki Byard and Keith Tippett.

Notable for a lack of bombast or sentimentality, his playing conveyed to attentive audiences a deeper warmth beneath its apparently austere surface. Whether he was playing his own compositions, pieces by Ellington and Monk or a standard such as The Folks Who Live on the Hill, there was always the feeling that the material was being thoroughly and sympathetically investigated, and that new facets were being turned towards the light. Across the UK, Europe, the US and elsewhere, his listeners respected his refusal to provide easy emotional triggers.

He was born in Huddersfield, the elder of the two sons of Marjorie (nee Emmott), a secretary, and John Riley, an engineer and part-time dance band leader, and educated at Huddersfield New College, then a grammar school. Like his brother, Paul, Howard received piano lessons from his father and by 1960 he was leading his own trio in a local club.

He studied music at Bangor University, where he gained a BA and an MA, and it was during an inter-university jazz competition at the recently opened Fairfield Halls in Croydon that he first encountered the saxophonist Evan Parker, a student at Birmingham University; they struck up a friendship and would soon be playing together.

Riley spent 1966-67 in the US, studying for an MMus degree at Indiana University, where he wrote his thesis on the composer George Russell’s Lydian chromatic concept of tonal organisation, under the distinguished professor David Baker, who had played trombone in Russell’s pioneering bands. Returning to England, Riley studied for an MPhil at York University from 1967 to 1970.

In 1967 he made his first recording, leading a trio with the bassist Barry Guy, who would become a long-term collaborator, and the drummer Jon Hiseman. A mere 99 copies of the album, Discussions, were pressed by Opportunity, a tiny independent label, ensuring its future status as a highly prized collectors’ item.

It was an exciting time to be at the cutting edge of British jazz, and a year later Riley became one of a small group of London-based musicians signed to CBS, a major label. Riley’s two albums for the company, Angle (1969) and The Day Will Come (1970), again featured his trio, with Hiseman replaced by Alan Jackson, and were widely praised.

Over the course of those three albums, and a fourth, Flight (1971), on the Turtle label, with Tony Oxley replacing Jackson on drums, the group could be heard developing a language that moved away from American influences and the orthodox trio approach towards something much freer, including the application of electronic devices to increasingly adventurous compositions by each of the musicians.

All three rejected the sort of involvement in a jazz-rock fusion that was proving irresistible to their contemporaries. While others were copying rock’s basic rhythm pattern, Riley believed that “it negates practically all the rhythmic developments made over the last few decades”.

A composition for octet, titled Convolution, was commissioned from the pianist in 1970 by BBC Radio 3’s Music in Our Time. That year he was also a founder member of Guy’s 21-piece London Jazz Composers Orchestra and of the Musicians Co-operative, a short-lived organisation set up to lobby for greater exposure for the newer forms of jazz.

The first of his many solo albums, Shaped, was released in 1977. Another, Beyond Category (1993), examined the compositions of Monk and Ellington. There would be duo albums with Byard, Tippett and the saxophonist Elton Dean, and appearances with other small groups, including a trio with the bassist Jeff Clyne and the drummer Tony Levin and a quartet with Guy, the saxophonist Trevor Watts and the drummer John Stevens, all of whom Riley had met at the Little Theatre Club in London in the late 60s.

From the 70s onwards he taught in London at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and at Goldsmiths College (now Goldsmiths, University of London), where his popular Saturday jazz workshop lasted from 1979 to 2020.

In 2012, during a solo performance at the Royal Festival Hall, he suddenly experienced the feeling that one of his feet had seized up, making it impossible to depress the damper pedal. When the sensation recurred on a much more drastic scale during a subsequent recording session, he went to the doctor and was told he had Parkinson’s disease.

Medication enabled him to resume practising and performing, and a memorable duo concert in 2016 with Tippett at the Pizza Express in London became part of the filmmaker Cath Longbottom’s documentary on Riley, shown at GIOfest, an annual festival of improvisation in Glasgow, in 2021. His final releases, including Constant Change, a seven-CD retrospective, were issued on the NoBusiness label, run from Vilnius by two Lithuanian enthusiasts.

The effects of Parkinson’s grew more debilitating, and Riley made his final public appearance at Guy’s 70th birthday evening at the Vortex in Dalston, north London, in 2017. Despite his physical frailty, the refinement and wisdom of his playing proved to be undimmed.

His final years were spent in a care home in Beckenham, Kent, where a piano was available. He is survived by Annie Garrett, his partner of 29 years, a former actor and drama teacher who helped set up the Brit school, and by three stepchildren, Tess, Fay and Reuben.

• Howard (John Howard) Riley, pianist and composer, born 16 February 1943, died 8 February 2025