In later life, with a shaven head and long flowing white beard, the clarinettist Tony Scott cut a distinctive figure, very much in keeping with the man who had recorded the million-selling musical backdrop for the hippie generation, Music for Zen Meditation. The royalties from this kept him in funds for the decades after the album was recorded in 1964, with his clarinet weaving mystical sounds around the shakuhachi of Hozan Yamamoto and the koto of Shinichi Yuizi.

Having turned his back on the US in 1959, Scott became a nomadic pioneer of world music before that hybrid genre had a name of its own. But he also left behind him a successful career as almost the only soloist to make effective modern jazz records on the clarinet, when most of his contemporaries preferred the saxophone.

He was born Anthony Sciacca in 1921, and grew up in New Jersey in a Sicilian family. At the age of 20 he enrolled in the Academy of Musical Art in New York (which later became Juilliard School of Music).

Although he was a gifted instrumentalist and was initially influenced by such swing players as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, he soon discovered the rich after-hours jam session life of New York, in which the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were creating bebop. This style became his passion, and although he worked for a time as a journeyman saxophonist, plying his trade for Tommy Dorsey, Buddy Rich and Duke Ellington to make a living, he was most at home playing his clarinet in the small groups in which swing was mutating to more modern styles of jazz.

With his dashing Italian good looks and what was then a mane of dark hair swept back in the Artie Shaw manner, Scott was signed to the RCA label, after working his musical apprenticeship on 52nd Street with the likes of Ben Webster and Sid Catlett. Although the albums he made were successful, including an excellent 1956 big band preserved on RCA’s Complete Tony Scott, he disliked the commercialism of the big-label mentality and preferred to play as the mood took him with small groups.

Scott was a skilled arranger and composer, by his own account responsible for much of Herbie Nichols’s celebrated composition Lady Sings the Blues. Indeed, his skills with manuscript paper and pencil almost led him back to the commercial world, as the musical director for Harry Belafonte in the mid1950s.

A close friend of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, who died in 1955 and 1959 respectively, Scott wrote a passionate and evocative autobiography focusing on their lives together. But he fell out with his publisher, eventually posting fragments of the manuscript on his website rather than seeing his full memoir into print.

His final sequence of recordings in New York involved the revolutionary trio led by the pianist Bill Evans. Their 1959 album Sung Heroes is a miniature masterpiece, Scott’s emotional clarinet combining with the clinical precision of Evans and his bassist Scott LaFaro, as the drummer Paul Motian created appropriate supporting textures. Later that year Scott forsook the US for a wandering life in the Far East. This prompted his interest in world music, although he often recharged his financial batteries by touring US service bases in the Pacific, playing straight-ahead jazz.

He realised that the accompaniment of Eastern instruments, playing on different scales from Western music, offered him a chance to use his clarinet to create some new sounds. His Zen Meditation album for Verve was followed up by more which were intended to be used for yoga, astral meditation or paying homage to Lord Krishna. These vastly outsold anything from his jazz period, and Scott was always just a little bemused by this.

For the last 30 years he lived in Italy, a country he had fallen in love with when visiting his extended family as a young man. He made occasional visits to Britain and the US in the 1980s and 1990s as a visiting soloist, and remained a powerful and distinctive clarinettist. He also indulged in one or two projects that confirmed his reputation in the jazz world for eccentricity, of which a 1989 double CD entirely made up of his recordings of Billy Strayhorn’s tune Lush Life was the most celebrated.

Scott was also a talented photographer, recording many periods of his life in excellent black-and-white pictures. He was a generous man, giving encouragement to many other clarinettists, notably the young American Evan Christopher. He was also good company, regaling companions with salty tales of long-ago jam sessions and musical deeds of derring-do from his American heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.

Tony Scott, jazz clarinettist, was born on June 17, 1921. He died on March 28, 2007, aged 85