Humphrey Lyttelton

Lyttelton - known simply as Humph to friends and fans - enjoyed a multi-faceted career doing things he loved, including stints as a cartoonist, writer and, most famously perhaps, broadcaster. For 45 years, he was Chairman Humph, the apparently disinterested and laconic referee of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, the self-styled "antidote to panel games" on Radio 4 and, according to its devotees, the funniest show on air. The programme provided an outlet for Lyttelton's mischievousness, wit and love of a double entendre, delivered in such a completely innocent manner that no-one was offended.

Lyttelton's greatest love, however, was jazz. He enjoyed an illustrious, six-decade, career as a jazz trumpeter and bandleader, and to many people he simply was British jazz. He was still touring with the current line-up of his band until very recently, and, over three decades, was a regular visitor to the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, where he made an impression not only with his playing, but with a sartorial style - canary yellow shirt tucked into underpants glimpsed over the waist of tomato red trousers being one particularly memorable ensemble - best described as absent-minded. His relationship with Edinburgh was such that, in 2005, he celebrated his 85th birthday with a special concert at the Queen's Hall.

The son of an Eton schoolmaster, Lyttelton was seduced by the music he heard on the radio in the 1930s. He told The Herald: "American big-band jazz was just beginning to impinge on British dance bands. People play what were called hot choruses', and I latched on to the trumpet playing of Nat Gonella - the first British musician to play like Louis Armstrong." From Gonella, it was a short leap to Armstrong himself, and when the teenage Lyttelton heard his records, "Bingo, I was hooked".

He pestered his mother for a trumpet until she relented. The instrument was secretly purchased while Mr Lyttelton was engrossed in the Eton and Harrow cricket match of 1936. Humph later said: "It was quite an event in Charing Cross Road when I got my trumpet because I was wearing the stuff that Eton boys who weren't playing cricket had to wear - a top hat, tail coat and a rolled umbrella. I was quite a sight. My mother chased round after me saying: Wouldn't a clarinet be nicer?'."

Lyttelton taught himself trumpet and formed his first band at Eton. After serving in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, he rebelled against his father's expectations by going to art school, rather than university. He played in George Webb's Dixielanders for a year before forming his own band in 1948. The band was at the forefront of the traditional jazz revival and, early on, it recorded with one of the original New Orleans greats - Sidney Bechet. When Louis Armstrong, famously toured Britain in 1956, Lyttelton's band was hired to join Satchmo's All-Stars on the bill. Armstrong, who had praised his young fan's playing by saying "That boy's comin' on" when he heard him in Nice in 1948, and Lyttelton became lifelong friends. That same year, Humphrey Lyttelton and his Band's recording of Bad Penny Blues became the first British jazz record to get into the Top 20.

In the 1950s, Lyttelton increased the size of the band and broadened its repertoire from exclusively trad so that it included more mainstream and modern music. Unlike many established jazz musicians, he was as much of a fan as he was an exponent of the art - as his Radio 2 show, The Best of Jazz, demonstrated.

He also remained interested in listening to others' playing and clearly thrived on the cross-generational aspect of music-making, famously collaborating with the pop band Radiohead, to great acclaim, in 2001. Just before his death, the jazz star is said to have declared an admiration for the voice of Amy Winehouse. Too bad for her that there is no-one to take Humph's place as the grandad of British jazz.

• By Alison Kerr