Humphrey Lyttelton used to say that he had written 200 tunes of which 199 had sunk without trace. The one that didn’t was Bad Penny Blues, recorded in 1956, in which Lyttelton’s muted trumpet was backed by the rolling boogie woogie of his pianist at the time, Johnny Parker. It became the first British jazz disc to enter the Top 20. Paul McCartney claimed it as a major influence on his piano backing to Lady Madonna.
In the light of this triumph, the rest of Parker’s long and varied career suffered somewhat the same fate as the bulk of Lyttelton’s compositions. Yet his work was familiar to thousands through his time spent with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, with Long John Baldry’s Hoochie Coochie men, and almost ten years with Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen during the 1970s.
John Robert Parker was born in 1929 in Beckenham, Kent, and had piano lessons as a child until the outbreak of the war, when he was evacuated to Wiltshire at 11. He steeped himself in the sounds of jazz heard over the American Forces’ Network and by the time he returned to Kent in his mid-teens he had become an enthusiastic amateur jazz pianist. During National Service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps he began to play with various well-known figures on the London jazz scene, including the singer Beryl Bryden and the bandleader Mike Daniels.
After demobilisation he joined the Magnolia Jazz Band led by Mick Mulligan and starring the young singer George Melly, who recalled that Parker’s penchant for tweed jackets and long woolly scarves was somewhat at odds with the sartorial mores of the bohemian jazz world of 1950s London. After a year of the fast-lane lifestyle of the Mulligan band, Parker left to join Lyttelton, with whom he stayed for six years. His time with the band included concerts alongside Louis Armstrong and Eddie Condon. These years saw Parker develop his mature style, in which his sound grasp of boogie woogie and New York stride piano drew favourable comparisons with many American musicians.
An attempt to form his own band in 1957 was a failure, and Parker took a day job as a factory inspector in Cricklewood while continuing to work as a semi-professional pianist with Graham Stewart’s Seven, before returning to full-time music as a member of Monty Sunshine’s Jazz Band. From there he went on to play rhythm and blues for a few years, playing with Korner, the blues harmonica player Cyril Davies, and Baldry. An overseas tour with Kenny Ball in 1967 was followed by an invitation to join the band in 1969, with which he remained until 1978.
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In a surprising move, Parker then joined the quintet led by the New Orleans-style clarinettist Sammy Rimington, and remained with this band for a year, often returning to it in the 1980s. He also became the pianist for the Fats Waller tribute show presented by the trumpeter Keith Smith and his group Hefty Jazz, and toured widely each summer in the occasional band led by Chris Barber’s trumpeter Pat Halcox.
Parker settled in North London, where he was married to the actress Peggy Phango, who had arrived in Britain with the cast of the South African musical King Kong and elected to stay. She had been singing with the Velvettes vocal quartet backed by Korner’s group while Parker was its pianist. They had two daughters. Phango predeceased him in 1998.
In the 1980s and early 1990s Parker played regularly in several London pubs, often with a trio or quartet. He was on hand to tour with such visiting American stars as Wild Bill Davison and Doc Cheatham, as well as being a temporary member of the New York-based Harlem Jazz and Blues Band. Always a generous band player, preferring to contribute to the ensemble, the dazzling brilliance of his solo turns on setpieces by Fats Waller, Scott Joplin or Jimmy Yancey would often take his audiences by surprise, and earn him rapturous applause. Latterly, he played frequently with the trumpeter Chez Chesterman.
Johnny Parker, jazz pianist, was born on November 6, 1929. He died on June 11, 2010, aged 80