The former head of jazz and founder of the jazz degree course at the Royal Academy of Music in London, the bassist and composer Graham Collier, has died at the age of 74, having passed away, according to reports, on Saturday in Greece.

In 1963 Collier was the first British graduate of Berklee, the famed Schillinger-based college of music in Boston where he studied with Herb Pomeroy, at a time when in the UK there was no formal major conservatoire study of jazz. Born in Tynemouth on 21 February 1937 the son of a musician, a drummer for silent movies, Collier had been in the army prior to Berklee spending six years in the forces from the age of 16.

During his career he recorded some 19 albums including the acclaimed Deep Dark Blue Centre, Darius and Songs For My Father, several of which have been reissued on vinyl in recent years. In 1986 Collier established the jazz degree course at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and was also involved in workshops that led to the formation of the influential Loose Tubes big band by a young collective of musicians whose members included Django Bates and Iain Ballamy.

Collier was awarded an OBE in 1987 and stayed at the Academy until his retirement in 1999 when he moved to Spain and later Greece. With his partner, the writer John Gill, he edited the educators’ magazine Jazz Changes from the late-1990s and was active in the IASJ (the international association of schools of jazz) taking part in seminars and workshops and continuing to perform and compose. In 2004 at the London Jazz Festival Collier revived his orchestra and performed a major retrospective of his work with material including his composition from 1967, ‘Aberdeen Angus’, and a new Birmingham Jazz commission ‘The Vonetta Factor’, with a band that included Steve Waterman, Harry Beckett, Fayyaz Virji, Art Themen, Chris Biscoe and James Allsopp. As an author Collier's books include most recently The Jazz Composer, Moving Music Off The Paper (2009); as well as Inside Jazz; Compositional Devices; Cleo And John; and Jazz, A Student’s And Teacher’s Guide.

– Stephen Graham