Humphrey Lyttelton

The postwar trad jazz revival in Britain owed its initial momentum to trumpeter and bandleader Humphrey Lyttelton, long regarded as the grand old man of the nation’s jazz scene, before he turned away from its strictures toward broader, more restless musical pursuits. Equally imposing in several other arenas, he built parallel reputations as an author and cartoonist while becoming a familiar radio voice through his decades-long role as the deadpan presenter of the evergreen panel show I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue. Born into an affluent and prominent family in Eton on 23 May 1921, Lyttelton developed an early passion for jazz that led him, at fifteen, to acquire his first trumpet and assemble a group with fellow pupils at Eton College; he simultaneously trained in military drumming with a retired Coldstream Guards drum major and played percussion in the school band.

After enlisting in the British Army on D-Day and serving in the Italian campaign, he took opportunities during London leave to sit in with local ensembles; demobilized in 1945, he entered the Camberwell School of Art. In March 1947 he joined the semi-professional George Webb’s Dixielanders, and when clarinetist Wally Fawkes advanced to create and draw a daily cartoon strip for The Daily Mail, Lyttelton inherited the task of supplying the paper’s “column-breakers.” He further contributed jazz and classical record reviews and later wrote scripts for Fawkes’s strip Flook.

Early in 1948 Lyttelton left the Dixielanders to form his own ensemble, recruiting Fawkes and later pianist Webb; the subsequent arrival of Blackpool-born brothers Keith on trombone and Ian on clarinet placed the band at the vanguard of the trad jazz movement. Fronted by Lyttelton’s commanding trumpet, the group’s New Orleans-rooted approach generated strong sales, prompting Parlophone to sign them in late 1949 and to schedule a fresh 78-rpm release every month until the advent of the LP era. Yet Lyttelton soon chafed at stylistic limits and, beginning in 1951, incorporated Latin and African rhythms while experimenting with multi-tracking on “One Man Went to Blow,” on which he performed trumpet, clarinet, piano, and washboard. Most controversially, he broke with the conventional trumpet-clarinet-trombone lineup by adding saxophones; as his ambitions expanded, the band served as a proving ground for emerging talents including saxophonists Tony Coe, Danny Moss, Alan Barnes, Joe Temperley, John Barnes, and Karen Sharp, and trombonists Roy Williams, Pete Strange, and John Picard, while also accompanying visiting Americans Sidney Bechet, Jimmy Rushing, and Buck Clayton.

The self-composed “Bad Penny Blues” became British jazz’s first Top 20 U.K. pop hit in 1956, after which the group toured Europe and the Middle East and, in 1959, crossed the United States alongside Thelonious Monk and Anita O’Day. Even as rock & roll eclipsed trad jazz, Lyttelton maintained an active performing schedule and simultaneously built a broadcasting career, most notably hosting the long-running BBC series The Best of Jazz from 1966 onward. In 1972 he also took the chair of I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, a program celebrated for its innuendo-laden humor. Over his lifetime he published several books—I Play as I Please, Second Course, Take It from the Top, Why No Beethoven, and It Just Occurred to Me…—and briefly worked as a restaurant critic. Calligraphy became another pursuit after he inherited a set of pens from his father; his proficiency led to his election as president of the Society for Italic Handwriting and inspired the name of his own imprint, Calligraph Records, which reissued his earlier recordings on CD. A younger audience encountered his playing when he appeared on Radiohead’s 2001 album Amnesiac. On 11 March 2008 he announced his retirement from The Best of Jazz; he died on 25 April following heart surgery.