Famous more for his Rabelaisian lifestyle than for the traditional jazz he played, Mick Mulligan was known as “the King of the Ravers”. The term “to rave”, meaning to party to excess, was coined by Mulligan and his agent Jim Godbolt, and slid into national usage.

Because Mulligan had his own personal Boswell, in the form of his band’s singer, George Melly, much of the band’s private language and outrageous behaviour made it into the public domain, principally on account of Melly’s wickedly comic autobiography Owning Up (1965).

By the time the book appeared Mulligan had given up the life of a professional jazz musician, retiring from the road to settle in Sussex, and venturing forth only occasionally with his trumpet. But from 1948 until 1962 he led his own jazz band, bridging the years from the dawn of postwar revivalist jazz to the “trad boom” of the early 1960s, and its doings were minutely chronicled by Melly.

In its life the band made a body of highly professional recordings, mainly for the Tempo label, despite Mulligan’s legendary unwillingness to rehearse. And some of the best names in British traditional jazz played in the band, including the pianist Johnny Parker, the bassist Jim Bray and the trombonist Roy Crimmins. The longest-serving members of Mulligan’s group included the clarinettist Ian Christie (who became a newspaper film critic), the trombonist (and former Lancashire cricketer) Frank Parr, the pianist Ronnie “Bix” Duff and the drummer Pete Appleby.

Peter Sidney Mulligan, always known as “Mick”, was born in Harrow in 1928, attended Merchant Taylor’s School and was commissioned during his national service in the Rifles. He loved the jazz trumpeters of the 1930s and 1940s, and when he took up the instrument himself, his style was firmly in the brash, exciting mould of such Chicagoan players as Max Kaminsky and Wild Bill Davison.

On his discharge from the Army, still living at home in Ealing, Mulligan joined the family firm of wine shippers. This association was not to last. Mulligan’s misuse of the firm’s profits to seduce a showgirl, and his assiduous and costly attendance at tastings eventually led to a parting of the ways.

In any event, his heart was in his band, and he made the decision to turn professional in 1950. By this time Melly, who had invited himself to become a founder member, was well established as the band’s singer, and perhaps the most curious recording he and the band produced in its earliest days was a set of 78s covering the History of Jazz, narrated in the clipped patrician tones of the optician-turned-jazz expert Rex Harris. At least this showed the band had the ability to play in a range of traditional styles, but when it became fully professional and shed its tuba for a double bass and its banjo for a guitar, it established its own distinctive Chicagoan style, very much in sympathy with Mulligan’s own playing.

In 1953 Mulligan broke up his band briefly to become Melly’s agent, but before long he was “borrowing” Alex Welsh’s band as if it were his own, and it was only a matter of months before he re-formed the group.

As the band travelled all over the country, playing everything from seedy dance halls to smart dances, and from rundown jazz clubs to university and college balls, Mulligan’s reputation for wild living was established. With a huge enthusiasm for alcohol and women, he and Melly made their own particular impact on just about every large town in Britain. Even after Mulligan met his first wife, Pam Walker, he was wont to try his luck in the provinces, but their flat in Lisle Street, in Central London, became his anchor.

With his charming grin and quick wit, a glint in his eye and a cigarette clamped between the fingers of his left hand as his trumpet pointed upwards, Mulligan was a charismatic bandleader. Even when he was the worse for wear (a notable example being when the band led by the dipsomaniac Eddie Condon was touring from the US and welcomed him into its circle) he could normally summon enough energy and sobriety to put on a show, although Melly was honest enough to recognise that what they purveyed as the years went on was “an increasingly dull noise”. On the rare occasions when he was too far gone to play, his catchphrase became: “There comes a time when you just say f**k it!” This was also his response when, after several minutes of remonstrating with his band for making an uproarious drunken noise knocking over a wardrobe on an RAF base at 3am, next to a hutful of sleeping airmen, his anarchic instincts took over and he jumped gleefully on to the offending piece of furniture, smashing it to matchwood.

At its best, his playing was as good as anything on offer on the British jazz scene, and a trumpet solo such as Big House Blues from January 1956 shows what he was capable of. For this reason, his group toured in support of such visiting US stars as Big Bill Broonzy, Brother John Sellers and the Gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. This established Mulligan in the highest echelon of British bandleaders, along with Welsh, Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber.

In 1962, as trad was finally on the wane, Mulligan gave up his band, and in due course moved to Pagham in Sussex. He appeared occasionally into the early 1970s but then gave up music entirely, apart from a brief resumption in 1987 to play at his son’s wedding. He ran a grocery and off-licence, and in later life developed an enthusiasm for horseracing and joined a syndicate owning flat-racing horses.

He is survived by his second wife, Tessa, and the four children of his first marriage.







Mick Mulligan, jazz trumpeter and bandleader, was born on January 24, 1928. He died, as the result of a stroke, on December 20, 2006, aged 78