Joe Maneri, at 82; legendary jazz musician, conservatory teacher

“I get nuts,’’ he said in an interview posted on www.jazzweekly.com. “I hold the horn. I bend down. I get up. I skid around. I don’t move. I move. It’s a beautiful experience.’’

Memorable in performance, influential in his New England Conservatory classroom, and eternal in his recordings and compositions, he emerged from an uncertain childhood and a learning disability to become a legendary figure in jazz, respected for his incisive mind and his artful solos.

Mr. Maneri, who more than 30 years ago launched what many regard as the first college-level course in microtonal theory and composition, died Monday in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of complications from heart surgery. He was 82 and lived in Framingham.

In classes and private lessons, Mr. Maneri introduced scores of students to an approach that divided the 12 tones used in most Western music into 72 fractional tones.

“He taught microtones by singing,’’ said James Bergin, executive director of the Boston Microtonal Society, which Mr. Maneri founded in 1988. “And his willingness to be uncomfortable was part of his success.’’

Bergin said that Mr. Maneri, with whom he studied, embraced music that, at first listen, could cause uneasiness among students and listeners accustomed to the conventional 12 tones. Mr. Maneri did so in lessons and with “Preliminary Studies in the Virtual Pitch Continuum,’’ a book he coauthored with Scott Van Duyne.

“You had so much trouble with 12, 72 seems impossible,’’ Bergin said. “And yet the genius of the book, the genius of his exercises, is that you gradually get your feet wet. It’s about really hearing microtones as a viable musical language, not as an effect.’’

Drawing from his early background playing songs from Greek, Jewish, and Turkish traditions at clubs and social gatherings in New York, Mr. Maneri understood the way microtones were used in ethnic music. He combined that with a grounding in theory, studying for more than a decade with the composer Josef Schmid, who had been a student of Alban Berg - himself a disciple of the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Combining that academic lineage with the rigors of jazz performance, Mr. Maneri gave students “the courage to take on a new system of hearing and a new system of notation,’’ Bergin said. “His was an embrace of the Western canon and a carrying on from it.’’

When New England Conservatory presented Mr. Maneri with an honorary doctorate at its commencement earlier this year, Hankus Netsky, who chairs the contemporary improvisation department, praised his lifetime of innovation.

“It was never enough for him to play or write music the way others did it,’’ Netsky said of Mr. Maneri. “Instead, he reinvented every genre he worked in, bringing the challenging discipline of 12-tone composition and microtonality to his improvisations, wowing his audiences even as he stretched their ears beyond their wildest dreams.’’

Joseph Gabriel Esther Maneri’s own dreams were somewhat muted as a child growing up in a cold water flat in Brooklyn, N.Y., the only child of a father who played clarinet and a mother who sang opera and folks songs at home. He spoke in later years of how being learning disabled made the life in which he traversed somewhat of a mystery. He became a conservatory professor, but barely made it into high school before dropping out.

Beginning at 11, he studied clarinet, moving through three teachers even as he began playing professionally. By 19, he was earning money playing for weddings, soaking up dance music from a spectrum of European traditions, and expanding his repertoire when he “played for the best belly dancers’’ at Greek and Turkish clubs, he wrote in an autobiography posted on www.allaboutjazz.com.

By 1946, he also was playing improvisational jazz with musicians who encouraged him to use all 12 tones in solos.

“It was exciting to play melodic jazz-like phrases without tonality,’’ he wrote.

In addition, he began studying with Schmid twice a week, supplemented with piano lessons that, with his other instruments, “brought me to six hours of practice daily.’’

Mr. Maneri kept performing and started composing, too. Erich Leinsdorf, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned him to write a piano concerto in 1963, but the piece, “Metanoia,’’ didn’t end up being performed until 1985, when it premiered in Alice Tully Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center.

Meanwhile, Mr. Maneri’s work attracted the attention of Gunther Schuller, then president of New England Conservatory. In 1970, Schuller brought Mr. Maneri to the school, where he taught harmony, counterpoint, composition, and saxophone improvisation before initiating the conservatory’s course in microtonal theory.

An exacting and sometimes emotional teacher, Mr. Maneri could be moved to tears if he didn’t think a student cared enough about music.

“He was an incredibly powerful character,’’ said Julia Werntz, a composer who studied with him privately and is now artistic director of the Boston Microtonal Society. “He had a hilarious sense of humor, and also was extremely demanding of everybody. What he seemed to want was that there be nothing false or formulaic in what we did. He wanted us always to seek a musical truth, something genuine.’’

Bergin said Mr. Maneri’s lessons “were astonishing moments of searching and searching. That’s who he was. You never arrive: You’re always seeking, sometimes finding.’’

Mr. Maneri married artist Sonja Holzwarth more than 44 years ago and was “such a giving soul, and so very, very humble and loving toward his wife and children,’’ said his daughter-in-law, Lucy Walters Maneri. “The love he had with his wife would just blow you away.’’

Though successful as a teacher, recognition for his performing came late in life. Music he recorded in the 1960s found its way to Harvey Pekar, the Cleveland comic book artist and jazz lover. The soundtrack to the 2003 movie “American Splendor,’’ based on Pekar’s life, opens with “Paniots Nine,’’ a joyful explosion of Mr. Maneri’s playing that exposed a fresh audience to his music.

About a decade before that, he burst back onto the scene with a well-received performance at the Montreal Jazz Festival and touring internationally with his son, Mat of Brooklyn, N.Y., an accomplished jazz artist on the six-string electric violin.

“To have a son that’s so talented is not a common occurrence,’’ Mr. Maneri told the Globe in 1995. “And to end up playing with him is a dream.’’

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Maneri leaves two daughters, Nina Arnold of Lunenburg and Gloria of Tucson; two other sons, Sal of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Abraham of Brooklyn; and eight grandchildren.

A service will be announced.