Swedish jazz musician and composer whose reputation was sealed by a single recording with Stan Getz in 1951
Bengt Hallberg, the Swedish jazz pianist, composer and arranger, who has died aged 80, won an overnight international reputation in 1951, when he recorded Ack Värmeland Du Sköna (Dear Old Stockholm) with the young American saxophone star Stan Getz. Hallberg's class was even noticed in those early years by Miles Davis– who remarked on a blindfold test for the critic Leonard Feather in 1954: "That pianist really gasses me … so clean, and he swings and plays his own things."
Born in the coastal city of Gothenburg, Hallberg was recording by his mid-teens, having played in jazz and dance bands while still at school. He made his debut on record with the Stockholm bassist and bandleader Thore Jederby in 1948, and led his first trio session at the age of 17. Both Getz and his fellow saxophonist Lee Konitz toured Sweden in 1951, and Hallberg was already the obvious choice as accompanist. By the middle of the decade, he was unchallenged as Sweden's leading jazz pianist, partnering touring American celebrities including the trumpeters Clifford Brown and Quincy Jones (the eventual studio superstar wrote his first arrangement on that 1953 trip, for a recording with Hallberg and Brown), working regularly with the Gothenburg orchestra of the drummer Kenneth Fagerlund, and performing with the leading local saxophonists Lars Gullin and Arne Domnérus.
Hallberg's piano style in his early years reflected the urbane swing of the Benny Goodman pianist Teddy Wilson, the bebop drive of Bud Powell, and the more austere and linear approach of Lennie Tristano. Following his move to Stockholm in 1954, however, Hallberg took up counterpoint and composition studies at the city's conservatoire (the Kungliga Musikhögskolan) with the classical composer Lars-Erik Larsson. The education made him increasingly devoted to classical music, though his expanded knowledge also made him more expansive and resourceful as a swing pianist. Hallberg worked during his college years with the clarinettist Ove Lind in a Goodman-inspired quartet, but on his graduation in 1957 delved into composition, arranging and studio work, becoming at one point a music director for Philips Records.
He continued to lead his own trios, with Kiddin' on the Keys (his second LP, 1959) revealing both his sensitivity as a ballad player and an attractive mischievousness, and the live album At Gyllene Cirkeln (1962) indicating that he was finding his own way into the new free-harmony, modal jazz style without copying its US piano master, Bill Evans. Hallberg also regularly performed in the Swedish Radio Big Band and late in the 1960s with the Radiojazzgruppen (Radio Jazz Group) ensemble, led by Domnérus.
In the 1970s, the pianist recorded sparingly as a leader, but explored both jazz standards and a little traditional Scandinavian folk music, on Hallberg's Happiness (1977). In 1982 he recorded a graceful duo album (Two of a Kind) with the vocalist Karin Krog, and worked in New York with a Swedish-American band that included Domnérus, the trombonist Jimmy Knepper, the trumpeter Tom Harrell and the altoist Jerry Dodgion. Later in the decade, he co-founded the group Trio Con Tromba, with the trumpeter Jan Allan and bassist Georg Riedel. In the solo piano set Hallberg's Surprise (1987), the open-minded Hallberg set traditional folk-themes, Paganini, Fats Waller, Handel, Ellington and Chopin side by side, and sounded equally inventive and at ease with all of them. In the same year, he made a big-band record (Spring on the Air), influenced by the harmonies of Ellington and Gil Evans, but devoted to his personal impressions of the life and landscape of his homeland.
Hallberg performed less in later years, but emerged in his late 70s to play at the memorial concert for Domnérus, and in 2012 participated in a two-piano concert with Jan Lundgren, one of his most sophisticated followers, at the Ystad jazz festival in Sweden.
Summing up his work in later years, Hallberg considered that playing the piano part in Shostakovich's G minor quintet live on radio in 1995 was his toughest assignment, and working with Getz as a young man his best. And though he composed fully notated music extensively – for chamber groups, ballet ensembles and film scores – Hallberg always maintained his affection for what he called the "very special connection with the audience" in jazz. As he put it: "They notice that there is something just for them, that cannot be repeated."
His first two marriages, to Inga Sundström and Maud Pettersson, ended in divorce. His third wife, Britt Linnéa Stern, died in 2010, and he is survived by his partner, Mariana Persson.
• Bengt Hallberg, jazz pianist, composer and arranger, born 13 September 1932; died 2 July 2013
