Humphrey Lyttelton

Humphrey Lyttelton also known as ‘Humph’, was an English jazz musician and broadcaster from a British aristocratic family. Lyttelton was born Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton on May 23, 1921, at Eton College where his father, George William Lyttelton was a housemaster. Both of his parents had a musical background, his mother, Pamela Lyttelton, played piano, and guitar and his father took up the cello while at Cambridge. Humphrey attended Sunningdale Preparatory School and went on to Eton College where he found his love of jazz. Humphrey’s musical hero was trumpeter Louis Armstrong, inspired he received his first trumpet at age 15 and taught himself the instrument. Humphrey went on to form his own quartet in 1936. He also studied military drumming under a former Coldstream Guards drum major and joined the school band as a percussionist. After leaving school, Lyttelton worked at the Port Talbot steel plate works in South Wales, until he enlisted in the British Army on D-Day, where he was he was an officer in the Grenadier Guards, an infantry regiment of the British Army. When the war ended on VE Day, May 8, 1945, Lyttelton joined in the celebrations by playing his trumpet from a wheelbarrow, inadvertently giving his first broadcast performance on the BBC.

Lyttelton continued to pursue his artistic pursuits post-World War 2 by attending Camberwell Art College. In 1949, he joined the Daily Mail as a cartoonist, where he remained until 1956, working with Wally Fawkes, a fellow jazz enthusiast and clarinet player, on the long-running cartoon strip Flook. He also reviewed jazz and classical recordings for the newspaper. In 1947, Fawkes and Lyttlelton both joined the George Webb Dixielanders, a group that fathered the traditional jazz movement in Britain. In early 1948 Lyttelton resigned from the Dixielanders to found his own group, bringing Fawkes and later pianist Webb with him. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lyttelton was prominent in the British revival of traditional jazz forms from New Orleans. In late 1949, The Humphrey Lyttelton Band signed to Parlophone, and their 78-rpm efforts sold so consistently that the label issued a new release each month until introducing the LP format several years later. In 1956, he wrote and released his pop chart hit, "Bad Penny Blues", which was on the UK Singles Chart for six weeks, and the first British jazz record to enter the Top 20. In 1948 Humphrey assembled a big band for BBC broadcasts and records, and from 1957-58 blues singer Jimmy Rushing toured England with the band. However, Lyttelton quickly felt smothered within the narrow creative confines of the trad jazz sound and began embracing Latin and African rhythms as early as 1951 -- he also exploited new technologies, employing multi-track recording techniques to play trumpet, clarinet, piano, and washboard on "One Man Went to Blow."

Lyttelton is survived by his four children, on April 25, 2010, two years after Lyttelton's death, a celebratory concert entitled "Humphrey Lyttelton — A Celebration Concert" was held at the Hammersmith Apollo to celebrate his life, works, and contribution to music. The event was organized and hosted by his son Stephen Lyttelton, who is also the founder and Chairman of The Humph Trust, an organization set up to support young up-and-coming jazz musicians. Lyttelton received the Lifetime Achievement Awards at both the Post Office British Jazz Awards in April 2000 and at the first BBC Jazz Awards in 2001, and on July 23, 2008, Lyttelton was posthumously named BBC Radio 2 Jazz Artist of the Year, voted by radio listeners.