Peter Appleyard - Telegraph Known for his dazzling melodic improvisation, Appleyard played with a roll-call of the world's most famous jazz musicians, including Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Tony Bennett and the Basie Band, and Canadian artists including Oscar Peterson, Diana Krall, Anne Murray and Rob McConnell. He got his first break when he was approached in a record shop by a man who had noticed him banging his hands to the beat in a listening booth and who wanted to know if by any chance he played the drums. When Peter answered in the affirmative, the man explained that he was a member of a group whose drummer had been caught in bed with another woman and whose wife had smashed up his drum set in revenge. Within a few days Appleyard found himself on tour with Felix Mendelssohn and his Hawaiian Serenaders, performing numbers supposedly evocative of the South Pacific - complete with a troupe of grass-skirted hula dancers. Towards the end of the Second World War, Appleyard attended a swing band concert featuring a vibraphone player. The musician refused to sell him the instrument but, two years later, turned up on Peter's doorstep explaining that he no longer needed it. The man told him he had been working as a spy during the war, using the band - and the vibraphone - as his cover. Between performances he would sneak behind German lines in a Cessna aeroplane. Appleyard's last recordings, issued in 2012, were Sophisticated Ladies, a set of standards by leading female jazz singers, and Peter Appleyard And The Jazz Giants: The Lost Sessions 1974, a recording of a studio session featuring Appleyard playing alongside Hank Jones, Slam Stewart, Mel Lewis, Zoot Sims, Bobby Hackett and Urbie Green. The recording was voted best jazz album of the year in a critics" poll. For the last 30 years of his life Appleyard lived on a small ranch near Guelph, Ontario, where he kept horses and enjoyed riding to hounds. He was separated from his wife, Elfriede, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Peter Appleyard, born August 26 1928, died July 18 2013