After a run of dazzling and imperiously unpredictable appearances at Ronnie Scott's club during the 1960s, the great Sonny Rollins could do no wrong with British jazz fans. Until, that is, he turned up at the club in autumn 1974 with Rufus Harley, who has died aged 70, in tow. Harley convinced some Rollins devotees that the improv legend's relish for musical wild cards was as deviously determined as ever. Others shook their heads in disbelief, maintaining that even an artist of Rollins's cavalier creativity could take a step too far.
Because Harley was a jazz bagpiper, the first and most controversial of his kind. Freely acknowledging that many jazz fans thought he was crazy, Harley nevertheless evolved an authentic jazz technique on an instrument ostensibly unsuited to the idiom's nervy momentum and melodic complexity. In the world-music era jazz-influenced pipers are now more common, but Harley was ahead of his time, and paid a price for it in terms of dogmatic criticisms that he was a heretical presence in a jazz band.
His fierce blues playing on such early tracks as saxist Sonny Stitt's Pipin' the Blues, however, represents the evidence that he was a diligent and unexpectedly creative pursuer of a unique jazz path.
Harley died of prostate cancer in his hometown of Philadelphia. His career included performances with many major jazz figures as well as Rollins, including John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Stitt and Herbie Mann. A saxophonist originally, he had switched allegiances after hearing a pipe lament at President John F Kennedy's funeral.
He made four albums for the Atlantic label between 1965 and 1969, performed in Francis Ford Coppola's 1966 comedy You're a Big Boy Now, appeared on the Johnny Carson and Bill Cosby TV shows, once gave a bagpipe lesson to Muhammad Ali, and accompanied the singer Laurie Anderson on her 1982 album Big Science. Harley continued to work into the 1990s, giving a solo concert at the Lincoln Center in 1993, and working with hip-hop band The Roots.
Rufus Harley Jr was born of mixed African-American and Cherokee descent, near Raleigh, North Carolina, on May 20, 1936. The family moved to Philadelphia when the boy was two. He bought a saxophone while at high school. Family hardships forced him to leave school at 16, but his enthusiasm for music was sustained by lessons on the saxophone, oboe and flute. During the 1950s, he played local clubs on Philadelphia's thriving jazz and blues scene. But it was in November 1963, haunted by the chilling wail of the Black Watch pipe band on the broadcasts of Kennedy's funeral, that Harley set off in pursuit of a very different tonal palette for a jazz instrument.
Saxophonist Coltrane was already developing split-note multiphonic effects for the tenor saxophone, and some of Rollins's hoarse, braying sounds also suggested a distant relative of the bagpipes. But though Harley also attempted to explore these effects on the sax at first, he quickly came to the conclusion that Coltrane and Rollins had the field sewn up. A friend of Harley's, knowing of his interest in the pipes, saw a used set going for $120 in a pawnshop and bought it for him. He hurled himself into the bagpipes' mysteries with help from Dennis Sandole, a local musician- teacher who had also encouraged Coltrane. Within months, Harley was playing local clubs, and in little more than a year he was recording his first album.
At 6ft2, and with an inclination to perform in kilts or African robes, Harley cut an imposing figure. Like those early jazz-based world-musicians saxophonists Charlie Mariano and Yusef Lateef, he pursued the traditional uses of his instrument as well as its jazz potential. He introduced both middle-eastern and Celtic tonalities and was fascinated by accounts of the instrument's possible early evolution in ancient Egypt. Exploiting the bagpipes' power to sustain drones while cultivating a considerable jazzy agility, Harley also drew on the funky soul-jazz style popular in the mid-60s, which made his approach accessible yet surprising, and much more than a mere novelty.
Harley also recorded a bagpipe tribute to Kennedy during the Atlantic years, worked with vibraphonist Roy Ayers on Herbie Mann's Flute Bag, and on Rollins's The Cutting Edge in 1974. He also self-produced the 1972 bagpipe-funk session Re-Creation of the Gods, and in later years (with a band including his trumpeter son Messiah) moved on to explore electrified pipes, and even the use of the instrument in reggae music.
Harley also lived an active parallel life as a community worker for Philadelphia's poor (for the city's Housing Authority) and tireless oneman campaigner for the tightening of gun laws.
He is survived by his former wife, Barbara Jean Jones, 16 children, and 15 grandchildren.
· Rufus Harley, jazz bagpiper, born May 20 1936; died August 1 2006