Kenny Ball - Telegraph With Phillips he toured widely, played on his first broadcasts and performed at prestigious social events, including the Royal Household's Christmas party at Windsor Castle, attended by the entire Royal family. In October 1958, following brief periods with Eric Delaney's show band and Terry Lightfoot's Jazzmen, he formed his own outfit, Kenny Ball's Jazzmen. It was common practice for newly formed bands to take jobs at bars and dance-halls in Germany, in order to play themselves in away from public attention at home. It often proved a grim experience, with long hours and appalling conditions. Ball remembered musicians falling asleep on the stand towards the end of nightly seven-hour stints in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and Hamburg. The result, however, was a highly integrated band, with its own distinctive style. The Jazzmen were merely one of the better bands in a crowded field until the beginning of 1961, when Brian Matthew, host of the BBC Light Programme's Sunday morning show Easy Beat, was seeking an alternative to the show's usual fare of rock and pop. Taken with a Dixieland version of Cole Porter's Samantha on Ball's first LP, he booked the band to play it on the show. Fortunately, it was a pre-recorded programme, because the studio audience would not stop applauding, and their enthusiasm had to be judiciously edited to fit the time available. "The band made a colossal impact," Matthew wrote later. Our audience increased by leaps and bounds. Ball had been booked for four weeks and eventually stayed on for seven months. Samantha went straight into the charts in 1961, the first of 14 Kenny Ball singles to enter the Top 50. Among his other big hits were March of the Siamese Children and The Green Leaves of Summer (both 1962) and Sukiyaki (1963). All these pieces are brisk and cheery, and the tunes to some extent familiar. They follow Ball's winning formula of tightly arranged ensembles with constantly changing textures, interspersed by brief solos. Shortly after the success of Samantha, Lonnie Donegan invited the Jazzmen on to his television show, and their success was sealed. Kenny Ball's Jazzmen was the first band of its kind to appear on Sunday Night at the London Palladium and the first to play a season in variety at that theatre. As by far the most showbusiness oriented, it was well suited to the task. There was never a dull moment in the show, especially when the Jazzmen were joined by their new clarinettist, Andy Cooper, a born comedian whose chimpanzee caperings while singing I Wanna Be Like You, from Walt Disney's Jungle Book, invariably brought the house down. Ball himself seemed unstoppable. "You can always tell it's him," Humphrey Lyttelton once observed, "by the ebullience and the enthusiasm. He's indestructible. For a while, beginning in 1965, it seemed that he might not be indestructible after all. Both his embouchure (the muscles controlling the lips against the trumpet mouthpiece) and his lung power showed signs of giving out. After five years of careful attention the lip problem was cured; but his breath was still short. It was Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, appearing with him at a charity event, who coached him in a breathing exercise which set him on the road to complete recovery. The Trad Boom ended suddenly, with the triumph of the Beatles and Merseybeat, in 1963, but Kenny Ball's Jazzmen were scarcely affected. The band had by then become firmly established in the world of popular entertainment. They appeared in every episode of the first six series of the Morecambe and Wise Show, beginning in 1968, and were the resident band on Saturday Night at the Mill (BBC One) from 1975 to 1983. They toured in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In Russia they gave 28 shows in 31 days, finishing by playing Midnight in Moscow in Red Square. They played at the wedding celebration of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, at the Prince's request. The jazz world, never entirely comfortable with this kind of popular success, tended either to ignore or to patronise Ball; but no one could deny that he was a highly accomplished musician, an engaging singer and a meticulous bandleader. His performances did not vary much from year to year, but then neither did Louis Armstrong's. Like Armstrong, he had a lot of hits to his name and felt obliged to satisfy his audience by playing them. To borrow a phrase commonly used in showbusiness contracts, he presented "the act as known," and continued doing so with great success almost until his death. With his first wife, Betty, Kenny Ball had a son and two daughters. They survive him with his second wife, Michelle. Kenny Ball, born May 22 1930, died March 7 2013