Everyone who observed the performances of the jazz pianist John Hicks, who has died suddenly aged 64, remarked on his keyboard dash and rhythmic drive. The Guardian jazz critic John Fordham referred to his "alacrity of thought and execution" and the singer Betty Carter, for whom Hicks worked for several years, was unequivocal in her assessment. "Nobody sounds like John Hicks," she stated, adding, "the energy is always there."
It was this combination of irresistible creativity and responsiveness that Hicks brought to innumerable recording sessions, encompassing swing, hard bop and the avant garde, and made him a first-call choice for many of the most important American modern jazz groups. He always managed to sound like no one but himself, though audiences at Ronnie Scott's London club and elsewhere could see that he was equally at ease in the turbulent surroundings of the Charles Mingus Big Band or complementing the small group heroics of saxophone innovators Bobby Watson and David Murray.
Hicks was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where both his parents took their degrees, and felt himself to be typical of the African-American middle class. "I was brought up as a decent human being, where you had aspirations and there were expectations," he told me, laughing at the family's reactions to his career as a jazz pianist. "Not exactly what they had in mind," he said. His father, the Rev John Hicks Sr, moved the family from city to city as he took up posts of increasing importance in the Methodist church, eventually ending up in New York. His son stayed true to that religious grounding, playing in public for the last time at his late father's church, St Mark's United Methodist on 118th Street, the Sunday before he died.
After the family moved to Los Angeles, Hicks's mother started him on the piano at the age of seven. This segued into organ lessons - useful for the church - and participation in youth choirs. Likewise, his father made sure that his son met Duke Ellington and heard the great swing orchestras of Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford. According to Hicks, his father's interest in music served as a release from the intensity of his involvement with the civil rights movement.
Having also dabbled with the violin and, briefly, the trombone, Hicks's interest in the piano was cemented when the family moved to St Louis when he was 14 - his father became the first black to be elected to the city's school board. His fellow high school students included a whole raft of players who later became prominent in advanced modern jazz, including the trumpeter Lester Bowie (obituary, November 11 1999).
Still involved in choral music, Hicks also began to hang out with some of St Louis' older musicians - he later credited pianist John Chapman as an inspiration. When the titanic saxophone duo of Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Johnny Griffin came to town minus a pianist, he was thrown in at the deep end, and coped; he also honed his blues skills, travelling the south on summer jobs with Little Milton and Albert King, sometimes playing four gigs in 18 hours. After completing a course at Lincoln University in Chester county, Pennsylvania, and briefly attending the Berklee School of Music, in Boston, he returned to St Louis, before moving to New York at trumpeter Clark Terry's instigation in 1963.
Within hours of arriving in town, Hicks was hired by the blues singer Big Maybelle, which led to jobs with saxophonist Joe Farrell and a road tour with the ex-Basie stars, trombonist Al Grey and tenorist Billy Mitchell. Then pianist Cedar Walton recommended Hicks to Art Blakey. "You had one time to play with the music, then Art would ceremoniously collect the music and lock it up in his drum case," he recalled.
Hicks stayed with Blakey for two years, returning again in 1973 and appearing at Ronnie Scott's. In between he worked with Betty Carter - "It was like playing with a horn player," he said - and Woody Herman, for whom he also arranged.
Thereafter he freelanced, performing with some of the more challenging players on the contemporary jazz scene, including Pharoah Sanders, Arthur Blythe and Murray. He was an occasional member of the Mingus big band, fronted a trio as well as a highly regarded big band of his own and formed ensembles featuring his musical partner, flautist Elise Wood, to play his own intelligently constructed compositions. He also began a series of recordings devoted to the music of Billy Strayhorn, Erroll Garner, Mary Lou Williams and Earl Hines, which helped to cement his reputation as a valuable and distinctive soloist.
At the time of his death, Hicks had a full book of engagements, including an upcoming tour of Poland with trumpeter Eddie Henderson. As lively in conversation as he was animated at the keyboard, his early death robs jazz of one of its most compelling performers.
He was divorced from his first wife, Olympia, in the early 1990s; their son and daughter survive him, as do his second wife, Elise Wood, whom he married in 2001.
· John Josephus Hicks Jr, jazz pianist and composer, born December 21 1941; died May 10 2006