As the trumpeter with the Jamaican group the Skatalites, Johnny Moore played a key part in popularising the distinctive rhythms of ska, which later developed into reggae. His inventive soloing earned him the nickname “Dizzy” from his fellow musicians and the Skatalites enjoyed instrumental hits such as Guns of Navarone under their own name as well as playing on numerous recordings by other seminal Jamaican artists such as Prince Buster, Desmond Dekker and the Wailers.

Born John Arlington Moore in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1938, he was sent to a school for wayward boys run by nuns, where there was a strong musical programme, later claiming that he had deliberately pulled “a couple of pranks” to show he was “going haywire” to gain admission to the school and its music facilities. Under the direction of the school bandmaster, Ruben Delgado, he took up the trumpet and also studied musical composition.

After leaving the school he joined the Army, principally to play in the Jamaica military band, where he earned the nickname “Johnny Blow Blow”. Dismissed after three years on a charge of being “not amenable to military discipline”, he joined the Mapletoft Poulle Orchestra, but was thrown out for growing his hair in the Rastafarian dreadlocks style, still a rare sight in Jamaica in the early 1960s.

He took to spending his time at a Rastafarian camp led by the drummer Count Ossie at Wareika Hill and playing sessions for the leading Jamaican singers of the day until, in 1964, he was persuaded by the saxophonist Tommy McCook to cut his locks and join a new group bringing together many of the top instrumentalists on the island. The group included other musicians such as Don Drummond, Lester Sterling and Rico Rodriguez, whom he had known in reform school, and they became known as the Skatalites, a fitting corruption of the original suggestion that they should call themselves the Satellites.

Over their all-too-brief existence, the group shaped and defined the unique rhythm known as ska and helped to put Jamaican music on the world map. Many of their best sides under their own name were cut at Kingston’s famous Studio One run by the producer Coxsone Dodd, but they also recorded with the producers Duke Reid and Justin Yapp and were the backing group on recordings by singers such as Delroy Wilson, Desmond Dekker, the Maytals and a young vocal trio led by Bob Marley called the Wailers.

By late 1965 they had broken up, their collective spirit seemingly broken after they lost Drummond, who was imprisoned for the murder of his girlfriend. Their instrumental Guns of Navarone subsequently became the bestselling ska record of all time and one of the first ska records to be a hit outside Jamaica. By then, however, the Skatalites had split into two rival groups, Rolando Alphonso and the Soul Vendors and Tommy McCook and the Supersonics, with Moore playing in the former.

The Skatalites re-formed in 1983 and recorded the album The Return of the Big Guns and again in the 1990s, by which time most of the group’s core members were living in New York. They resumed recording prolifically, earning Grammy nominations for the albums Hi Bop Ska (1995) and Greetings from Skamania (1996). Moore left the band in 2002.

Johnny Moore, musician, was born on October 5, 1938. He died of colon cancer on August 16, 2008, aged 69