Few bands demonstrated that jazz is no longer an exclusively American art form better than the trio led by the Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson. Mixing sparkling and virtuoso performances of jazz standards by the likes of Thelonious Monk with programmes of entirely original material, EST (as the trio were known) blurred the boundaries between jazz and both rock and classical music. They were widely regarded as Europe’s leading contemporary jazz group. Performances were brilliantly tailored to their audiences so that deeply-felt romantic ballads had the grey heads nodding in approval at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham whereas their gritty urban funk propelled by the drumming of Magnus Öström, with howling electronic bass effects from Dan Berglund, turned the Miles Davis Hall at Montreux into a teeming, sweaty mosh-pit for 18 to 25-year-olds.

At the heart of everything they did was Svensson’s piano playing; technically brilliant, emotionally communicative, and a dazzling mixture of the contemporary with a profound knowledge of the jazz tradition. A measure of their popular appeal is that as well as being the first European band to adorn the cover of that most American of publications, Down Beat, their 2001 album Good Morning Susie Soho leapt to No 15 in the Swedish pop charts and the accompanying video was shown worldwide on MTV. The band won the BBC Jazz Award for best international act in 2004.

Esbjörn Svensson was born in Västeras, Sweden. His mother played the piano and his father collected jazz records, but his real musical development took place with his boyhood neighbour and school friend Magnus Öström. “When we were at school, we had our very first trio, with another boy who played electric bass,” Svensson recalled. “I sang as well as playing the piano, trying to sound like Jerry Lee Lewis. Magnus and I went on to start our first proper jazz trio when we were 17.”

Three years of formal piano study led to a degree at the Kunliga Musikhögskolan (Royal School of Music) in Stockholm, and as well as honing his classical technique, Svensson played jazz with the drummer Frederik Norén, and continued his interest in pop and rock, beginning a long association with Nils Landgren’s Funk Unit by playing keyboards and synthesizers. Throughout all this, he and Öström continued to play together, exploring both rock and jazz, but settling on the latter in 1993 when they were joined by Dan Berglund on the double bass.

Initially, they played conventional modern jazz, heavily influenced by Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea, and their first disc, When Everyone Has Gone, was good but unexceptional. It was their third album consisting of novel interpretations of Thelonious Monk that started to bring them to the attention of jazz critics across Europe, but their breakthrough to popular success came with From Gagarin’s Point of View in 1999.

This included an extraordinary track called Dodge the Dodo that was a completely new sound in contemporary jazz. A languorous free form ballad alternated with passages of hard-hitting funk, in which Berglund’s bass howled through an effects unit like Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. “We are,” said Svensson at the time, “really interested in contrasts, between different types of sound and different feelings. To pick out the action from the chaos you need some passages of calm, or you won’t be hungry to hear the more challenging sections of the piece.” This mastery of contrast governed much of his subsequent writing for the group.

They first appeared in Britain at the Swedish Jazz Extravaganza in 1999, and named their sixth album Good Morning Susie Soho after a girl they met in the street outside the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Dean Street. By the time they did their first national UK tour in 2003, they were a sufficiently established act that audiences turned up to shout out requests for obscure titles from such albums as Winter in Venice or Strange Place for Snow.

These were willingly played by a band that valued live performance as much as its albums, in which Svensson was a ruthless editor, paring away what he regarded as superfluous material to create sequences of work that hung together as musical entities as well as being united by Öström’s wittily punning titles.

With each album the trio absorbed an ever wider range of influences, so that Baroque basslines underpinned When God Created the Coffee Break on Seven Days of Falling and chipper prepared piano and percussion effects were central to The Goldhearted Miner on Tuesday Wonderland. Because the trio were based on a close friendship that had its roots in childhood, audiences were able to share in the band’s collective joy in music-making. They were joined on the road by the lighting designer Kristoffer Berg — who improvised visually along with the band — and by their own sound engineers. At the heart of everything the three musicians did was a collective daring and a collective glee, best encapsulated in their recording Providence, a tour de force of high-speed invention that finally ends with their delighted shrieks and whoops at what they have just created.

The band had just finished recording its twelfth album, Leucocyte, and were about to begin an international tour encompassing this summer’s Edinburgh and Brecon jazz festivals. Svensson was scuba diving with a group in the Stockholm archipelago when he was found severely injured on the seabed. Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful.

He is survived by his wife, Eva, and their sons, Ruben and Noah.

Esbjörn Svensson, jazz pianist and bandleader, was born on April 16, 1964. He died on June 14, 2008, aged 44