Danish-born saxophonist at the heart of the 'new thing' jazz movement of the 1960s
When the saxophonist John Tchicai, who has died aged 76, performed with local musicians at the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, north London, in 2005, the show was sold out long before the start – though disappointed disciples stayed on within earshot of the premises, hoping to catch a stray sound. He was a beanpole of a man in a baseball cap who combined an amiable gravitas with an unassuming creative openness to his surroundings, and to the night's largely unfamiliar playing partners.
Plenty of people on the bandstand and in that crowd knew of Tchicai's remarkable history, however. He had the rare distinction of having played with both John Lennon and John Coltrane. He had worked with such American free-jazz stars as the saxophonists Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler, and the pianist Cecil Taylor, and was a member of both the New York Contemporary Five and the New York Art Quartet, two of the most focused and creative bands in the sometimes sprawling "new thing" jazz movement of the 1960s.
Initially influenced by the unfettered bluesy cry of Ornette Coleman and the sparing, soft-toned and enigmatic sound of Lee Konitz, Tchicai's sound grew tougher during the 1980s, when he increasingly played the tenor saxophone as well as the bass clarinet.
He always sounded patiently composed, wise and lyrical even in the most abstract circumstances. From the 1990s and into the 21st century, dividing his time between California (where he had family) and Europe, Tchicai became the first jazz musician to be awarded a lifetime grant from the Danish ministry of culture. In later years he broadened his palette to include lyrics, poetry and electronics, as well as making one of his finest recordings, John Tchicai with Strings (2005), a saxophone-and-electronics adventure steered by the British duo Spring Heel Jack – John Coxon and Ashley Wales, former drum and bass producers who had become fascinated by free-improvisation.
Tchicai was born in Copenhagen to a Congolese father and a Danish mother. He grew up in Aarhus, where he first learned the violin, then, as a teenager, the clarinet and alto saxophone after hearing American jazz musicians on tour. He studied the alto saxophone at the Royal Danish Music Conservatory, and in 1962 met Shepp and the trumpeter Bill Dixon at a festival in Helsinki. Following them to New York the next year, Tchicai was soon playing with Shepp and the trumpeter Don Cherry in the New York Contemporary Five.
In 1964-65 he was a member of the New York Art Quartet alongside the pioneering free-jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd, played with Ayler (on New York Eye and Ear Control) and in 1965 appeared on Coltrane's influential large-ensemble Ascension session alongside Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and others.
Tchicai returned to Denmark and led the Cadentia Nova Danica free-jazz big band from 1967. With the British drummer John Stevens, he unexpectedly joined Lennon's abstract guitar feedback sounds and Yoko Ono's screamed vocals on the pair's 1969 "noise-music" performance in Cambridge, featured on their album Unfinished Music No 2: Life with the Lions.
Tchicai withdrew into teaching and yoga studies for much of the 1970s but worked with the Swiss piano virtuoso Irène Schweizer (1975), in the saxophonist Simon Spang-Hanssen's Strange Brothers ensemble (1977), and with the expat South African bassist Johnny Dyani. The next decade saw him work with the Dutch saxophone sextet De Zes Winden, the iconoclastic pianist Taylor's Two Continents Ensemble and the guitarist Pierre Dørge's extraordinary New Jungle Orchestra, an anarchic brew of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, African and Middle Eastern sounds, and blasting free-jazz.
From 1991, living in both California and Perpignan, southern France, Tchicai became very productive, on sessions including Grandpa's Spells (1992, a mix of traditional jazz, fusion and electronics), on religious music and larger-scale works for instruments and voices, and in a continuing partnership with Dørge. In 2010 he participated in a two-day residency at Cafe OTO, in Dalston, east London, with John Edwards on bass and Tony Marsh on drums.
Tchicai was married and divorced four times. He is survived by his daughter, Julie, and son, Yolo.
Val Wilmer writes: John Tchicai's father was brought to Europe as a teenager in 1906 by the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius. Joseph Lucianus Tschcaya (later spelt Tschakai) was born at Pointe Noire, a village near the Congo estuary, and met Frobenius during the latter's first African expedition.
The youngster had learned French and German at a Belgian mission school and lived with Frobenius as a servant. He was a useful contact whom the ethnologist educated further, and moved with him to Berlin. He travelled to the Netherlands and Belgium in search of work, and eventually to Scandinavia, where he worked in restaurants and nightclubs as a doorman and cigarette-seller.
He had eight children with two partners before meeting Tchicai's mother. The eldest of them was the drummer Kaj Timmermann, who in 1940 formed the Harlem Kiddies, the first black Danish band. Tchicai's parents met at the Aarhus pleasure-gardens, where both were working as waiters. Tchicai told me that his father's first words to his mother were: "I love you!" They were married soon afterwards.
• John Martin Tchicai, saxophonist, born 28 April 1936; died 8 October 2012