It was with the group Indo-Jazz Fusions that the career of the pioneer and visionary John Mayer, who has died aged 73 following a road accident, really came to a head. But in composition and performance, from the early 1950s, Mayer had transformed British music-making.
In the mid-1960s, the record producer Dennis Preston had asked Mayer if he had a composition for brass, wind and percussion to complete a recording for Ahmed Ertegun of Atlantic Records in the United States. Mayer wrote Nine For Bacon overnight. It impressed Preston, who proposed Mayer collaborate in fronting a "double quintet" with the Jamaican-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott.
By 1965, Indo-Jazz Fusions were performing. The album Indo-Jazz Suite (1966) was unlike anything before it. While Bob Houston in the Melody Maker hailed its "highly provocative and stimulating" mixture of Indian and jazz rhythms, journalists did not have the vocabulary to explain raga and tala (rhythm cycle) intricacies.
Two further albums, Indo-Jazz Fusions I in 1967 and Indo-Jazz Fusions II in 1968 (both reissued in 1998), confirmed the elegance of Mayer's precise scoring. Like Mozart or the US jazz composer Don Ellis, Mayer delivered staff-notated compositions with spaces for improvisation. Ultimately the group foundered because its jazz wing never mastered the discipline of raga improvisation.
Mayer was born the last of four children of a Roman Catholic family in Chandni Chawk, an impoverished district of Calcutta. Since his Madrasi mother spoke Tamil and Telagu and his Anglo-Indian father spoke mutually incomprehensible Bengali, English and Hindi became the languages of home. Near-starvation and penury inspired him to excel, for only by excelling could he escape his background.
He queued for food handouts at churches of many denominations. From early days, he had shown musical aptitude, which occasionally got him into trouble when reports of him playing violin before Protestant congregations reached home. He once shocked his mother saying that for 50 rupees he would play for the devil. While still at school, he got work - and tips - playing music in a cinema.
In Calcutta, he studied western music and violin with Phillipe Sandre and Indian music with Sanathan Mukerjee, who told him he had to put his knowledge of the two musics on an equal footing because he would always have to know more about western music than western musicians. He took this sage advice to heart.
Moving to Bombay, he studied western music with Melhi Mehta and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. Arriving in London in 1952, he studied composition with Matyas Seiber and spent five years researching comparative music and religion in eastern and western cultures. He worked as a violinist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1953-58) and then with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1958-65). "I was," he said, "the first black face in a symphony orchestra."
By 1952, he had written a new style of composition, a fusion of western and Hindustani music: Raga Music For Solo Clarinet. Now heard on Georgina Dobrée's This Green Tide (1995), it has entered the A-level syllabus.
Yehudi Menuhin invited him to pitch his work, leading to Menuhin performing his Violin Sonata (1955). In 1958 Charles Groves commissioned him to write what became Dances Of India for sitar, tabla, tanpura, flute and symphony orchestra for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. In 1967, the Lansdowne String Quartet with Diwan Motihar on sitar released his Shanta Quintet For Sitar and Strings.
Later interpreters of his work included the flautist James Galway, who recorded Galway Plays Mayer (1982). In 1983, Rohan de Saram (cello) and Druvi de Saram (piano) released their Prabhanda & Ragamalas on cassette (released on CD in 2002).
From 1996 onwards, Mayer, by then composer-in-residence at the Birmingham Conservatoire (where he saw in the BMus Indian music course in 1997), released a series of CDs as John Mayer's Indo-Jazz Fusions. The ensemble out-performed the Harriott-era ensemble because of its familiarity and facility with Hindustani improvisational techniques.
Mayer's musical landscape had no ivory towers, just contours dominated by peaks. Once, wearying of Ravi Shankar pontificating about Indian music's spirituality, Mayer impishly suggested he give the proceeds of his next concert to charity. Tears of laughter filling his eyes, Mayer told me Shankar's look spoke volumes.
He is survived by his second wife Gillian and their sons Jahan and Jonathan, his first wife Sheila and their daughters Lesli and Toni.
· John Mayer, musician, born October 28 1930; died March 9 2004