Although he had a distinguished recording career, the New Orleans clarinettist Alvin Batiste became internationally famous for his success as a teacher. The director of the Jazz and Louisiana Music Institute at Southern University in Baton Rouge for 17 years from 1969, and latterly on the faculty of the New Orleans Centre for Creative Arts, Batiste’s students included the saxophonists Branford Marsalis, Wes Anderson and Donald Harrison, the blind pianist Henry Butler, the drummer Herlin Riley and the bassist Reginald Veal, all of whom are among the brightest talents to emerge from Louisiana in the past two decades.

As a teenager Batiste played with the drummer Ed Blackwell, and in the late 1950s both men became part of the circle of Ornette Coleman in California. Before Coleman formed his revolutionary free jazz quartet, he played in a quintet with Batiste and the pianist Ellis Marsalis (father of Wynton and Branford). Towards the end of the 1950s, Batiste, Marsalis, Blackwell and the saxophonist Harold Battiste (no relation) returned to New Orleans and formed the American Jazz Quintet, one of the earliest free-improvising groups in Louisiana. In 1958 Batiste went out on the road with Ray Charles’s orchestra.

The following decade he entered academia, first at Southern University and then at Louisiana State University, eventually joining the staff at Southern at the end of the 1960s. Although he preferred to play free-form jazz, he became an accomplished composer, and wrote extended works for the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra. He was also an effective teacher in all styles of jazz, and his own stylistic breadth is evident from the soul jazz albums he recorded with Cannonball Adderley and the tributes to Louis Armstrong that he made alongside the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.

Despite the demands of his academic career, Batiste began to tour internationally in the late 1970s. Batiste retired from full-time teaching in the 1980s and began to record under his own name, as well as making guest appearances with Wynton Marsalis, notably on the album Crescent City Christmas Card. Batiste’s Jazzstronauts became a popular band on American festivals.

Batiste had been due to perform on the day of his death with Harry Connick Jr and Branford Marsalis at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, but suffered what is believed to be a heart attack. He had just recorded a new album for the Marsalis Music record label.

Alvin Batiste, jazz clarinettist and educator, was born on November 7, 1932. He died on May 6, 2007, aged 74