Sal Mosca

The chances of finding the jazz pianist Sal Mosca, who has died from the effects of emphysema at the age of 80, playing in a New York club some night in his seven-decade professional career must have been infinitesimal, given the long absences because of his preference for private practice over public performance. There he was, however, one night in November 1981, co-leading a quartet at the Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue with the tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh, another fugitive figure and fellow graduate of the informal school of jazz named after the blind pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano.

The music they created that night, like everything they ever played, bore Tristano's hallmark: an air of detachment that derived from the intensity of their involvement in their source material. Mosca was among the most gifted of those acolytes who, even in unbuttoned surroundings, continued to devote themselves to an austere investigation of the inner workings of chord sequences borrowed from standard Broadway tunes, rather than go for the cheap emotional outreach.

Mosca, born to first-generation Italian immigrants in Mount Vernon, New York State, was fascinated in boyhood with the sounds from the household pianola and was soon attracted to the music of such early jazz pianists as James P Johnson and Fats Waller. At 12 he began formal lessons at the keyboard; three years later he played in local nightclubs, a moustache disguising his age.

After Mosca's two years of wartime service in an army band ended in 1946, the GI bill enabled him to enrol at the New York College of Music, where he studied classical composition by day while listening to such giants as Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum in the clubs of 52nd Street at night. Soon he met Tristano, a controversial but magnetic figure who, over the next eight years of study, shaped his destiny.

His fellow pupils included Marsh and the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, and it was with these two distinctive young musicians that Mosca made his first recordings in 1949, the powerful influence of Tristano on his own playing apparent on pieces such as Marshmallow and Tautology. By 1957, on a Konitz album titled Very Cool, his real originality emerged in a series of short solos full of startlingly asymmetrical phrase-shapes, mixing close-voiced chordal passages with agile single-note lines that seemed to double back on themselves.

Konitz and Marsh remained his most frequent musical companions and a 1971 recording with Konitz, titled Spirits, contains several duets that demonstrate how adventurously the pianist had developed away from his model. He also made a few poorly distributed solo records, including A Concert, documenting a 1979 recital in New York and displaying the full extent of his technical resource and emotional rigour.

Like his mentor, Mosca spent most of his career shunning the public gaze. Instead he concentrated on practising and on passing on his knowledge to younger musicians at his home in Mount Vernon, where he adapted Tristano's specialised teaching methods.

He is survived by a daughter, two sons, and many pupils. Among these in the mid-1950s was a 13-year-old, Bob Gaudio, from New Jersey. For the first few weeks of tuition, Gaudio was required to do nothing but learn to scat-sing Louis Armstrong solos. Then he was invited to play classical pieces on a piano with weighted keys, to help develop speed and dexterity. Three years later Gaudio went on to join three other Italian-Americans, including the lead singer Frankie Valli, in a doo-wop group called the Four Seasons, for whom he co-wrote a string of million-selling hits. Then he gave Mosca the most unexpected, and incongruous, credit of his career on the cover of the Four Seasons' 1969 post-Sgt Pepper concept album, Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. "Salvatore Mosca: Private instructions," it said.

One pupil had not forgotten. Nor did anyone lucky enough to have witnessed his artistry one random night in Greenwich Village, more than a quarter of a century ago.

· Salvatore Joseph Mosca, pianist and teacher, born April 27 1927; died July 28 2007