In the heyday of the British revival of traditional jazz during the late 1950s and 1960s, the band led by the clarinettist Dick Charlesworth was in the top echelon of groups playing extrovert Dixieland to a mass audience. One contemporary account of the “trad boom” described the band’s sound as “rumbustious, lively, bursting with enthusiasm . . . the foot-tappingest trad you’ll hear”.

It was the time when Acker Bilk’s band sported Edwardian waistcoats, and Bob Wallis’s Storyville Jazzmen donned Confederate uniforms. Not to be outdone, Charlesworth clad his men in pinstripe trousers and morning jackets and dubbed them the “City Gents”. His publicity made much not only of their smart attire, but of their Latin motto, Dum vivimus vivamus, (“While we live, let us enjoy life”).

In its short life the band rose to third in the Jazz News readers’ poll in 1961, and the same year Melody Maker voted it into second place, behind Acker Bilk’s Paramount Jazz Band. Built around the nimble fluidity of Charlesworth’s phrasing, and his clear clarinet tone, modelled after American players such as Peanuts Hucko and Joe Muryani, who played for Louis Armstrong, the City Gents were notable for the breadth of material they played. Hence there would be obscure New Orleans pieces such as Blue Bells Goodbye or One Sweet Letter From You mixed in with swing-era standards such as If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight. These were worked into deft arrangements that made the most of the band’s other key soloists, the trumpeter Bob Masters (who went on to found the Robert Masters Artists’ Agency) and the trombonist Dave Keir (who was also skilled on every other instrument in the band).

Richard Anthony Charlesworth was born in 1932, growing up in Sheffield, where he attended the King Edward Grammar School, before joining the Ministry of Labour at the age of 16 as a clerk. His job took him from Sheffield, via Hull, to London, where he bought his first clarinet and began playing music as a hobby in 1952-53. After a couple of years of doubling the alto saxophone and clarinet in a dance band, he left to join Jim Wheeler’s Jazzmen, before forming his own semi-professional group in 1957.

After winning the South London Jazz Band Contest, and playing for the National Jiving Championships on ITV, Charlesworth’s group was signed by the Melodisc label, for whom it recorded its first EP in December 1957. The band’s debut on LP was for Doug Dobell, who ran a well-known jazz record business in Charing Cross Road, following which Charlesworth left the Civil Service, turned professional, and went on to make albums for Top Rank, HMV and the Danish Storyville label.

As the vogue for trad ended and the Beatles arrived on the pop scene, Charlesworth broke up his band, and spent the rest of the decade fronting a band on board the cruise liners Canberra and Orsova. He then settled in Spain, where he ran a bar, before returning to Britain in 1977. Soon afterwards he joined the trumpeter Keith Smith (obituary, February 12, 2008) with whom he worked until 1980, when he briefly joined another British trumpeter, the German-based Rod Mason.

Thereafter, he mainly led his own bands. He played frequently with the trumpeter Alan Littlejohn, and was a featured guest on the “Legends of British Trad” package shows organised by the drummer John Petters in the 1990s.

He was also a favourite on the BBC Radio series Jazz Score, which pretended to be a quiz show, while actually encouraging its participants to relate anecdotes about their lives in jazz.

Charlesworth continued to be active on the London jazz scene until the early years of the present decade.

Dick Charlesworth, jazz clarinettist and bandleader, was born on January 8, 1932. He died on April 15, 2008, aged 76