Even as a young man Humphrey Lyttelton, who has died aged 86, always seemed a jazz patriarch, and throughout his life his arrival at any jazz event somehow raised the social temperature, like the entrance of royalty.

I don't think this was the result of his very grand background (few jazzmen can boast a member of the Gunpowder Plot as an ancestor), nor even his own hyper-traditional beginnings — Eton college, Windsor, and the Brigade of Guards. Jazz musicians in general are not prone to forelock-tugging, and Humph's rare references to his past tended to be lightly ironic. It is undeniable, however, that he had a natural authority. I never heard anyone try to send him up or put him down, and this could have been due to the influence of his much-loved father George, an Eton housemaster; his mother Pamela was a keen amateur musician, and he took up the trumpet at the age of 15. Before going to Eton himself, he went to Sunningdale school, Berkshire.

There was indeed a certain pedagogue-like side to Humph. I was told by a member of one of his bands that he sometimes played unidentified records to his musicians and then shot questions at them. "That boy at the back of the class," he'd snap, "who's that on alto?"

Politically, however, he was firmly, if surprisingly, on the left. Prior to joining the Grenadier Guards in 1941 he was sent to work in a South Wales steel mill to find out if he had the makings of a "captain of industry", but the experience, on the contrary, turned him into a lifelong, sometimes active, socialist. It is in consequence very unlikely that he was never offered an honour, but equally in character that he should refuse it.

When it came to dealing with the press, Humph played his cards very close to his chest. He would talk or write freely about his musical life and the quirks of the musicians he had employed or, in the case of Americans, accompanied, but when it came to his social origins, the area which naturally attracted journalists, he gave them nothing beyond three stories which, for want of anything else, were repeated in almost every article or interview. They were: how he played hooky from the Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lord's to buy his first trumpet in the Charing Cross Road; how he waded ashore durng the allied landings at Salerno, south-west Italy, in September 1943, brandishing a pistol in one hand and his trumpet in the other; how on VE night, May 7 1945, dressed in his officer's mess uniform, he was wheeled round the West End in a handcart blowing lustily and finishing up outside Buckingham Palace.

Thin pickings, but positively Proustian compared with the way he guarded his private life. His telephone number was predictably ex-directory, but if anyone found it out and rang him it was changed at once. All information, bookings, or enquiries had to be filtered through his longtime manager, the fiercely protective but very likeable Susan Da Costa.

Perhaps he had not always been quite so reclusive. He wrote once that during Graeme Bell's Australian jazz band's first visit to Britain in the late 1940s he'd had "Australians like some people have mice," but that was early on.

In later years the metaphorical drawbridge of his house in Hertfordshire (built, he claimed, with the money he made on his one unexpected appearance in the hit parades. Bad Penny Blues) was always up. I can think of no more unlikely candidate for Hello! magazine.

After demob in 1946, Humph, like many ex-service men, took advantage of a grant to go to art school. At Camberwell School of Art, south-east London, he met up with Wally "Trog" Fawkes, a fellow jazz-lover, clarinettist (Humphrey too played clarinet well up to professional standard) and brilliant cartoonist.

In 1949, Wally was in a position to help his friend to get a job drawing "column breakers" for the Daily Mail, and to write for a time the storyline and balloons for Flook, Fawkes's long-lived comic strip - yet it was musically that their partnership was to prove most fruitful. By this time, through natural talent and rigorous application - he was self-taught musically - Humph's playing had improved sufficiently for him to be welcome to sit in at various jazz-oriented West End nightclubs. He had joined Wally as a member of the George Webb Dixielanders in 1947, and a legend was born.

Jazz "revivalism" had taken hold during the war, a mysterious passion for the music played and recorded during the 1920s in Chicago by black New Orleans immigrants. At first this enthusiasm was confined to discs, but eventually Webb, a tiny, somewhat aggressive South London piano player and factory worker, formed a band to reconstruct the music itself at a pub in Kent. Then Humph and Wally came along and raised the whole thing from enthusiastic approximation to a level not far removed from the original.

A year later, the two of them left to set up on their own, but Webb obviously bore no permanent grudge. Not so long after he joined Humph on piano.

The formation of the Lyttelton band coincided with, and led, a boom in revivalist jazz on a national scale. There were tours and "house full" concerts, but Humph's real home, after trying out various venues in the West End of London, was 100 Oxford Street, a shabby but enormous basement room, by day a cheap restaurant, and where twice a week there were queues round the block. It was not only the music. By this time Humph, following the example of the recent visit of the irreverent and relaxed Graeme Bell, had proscribed the seated pipe-smoking solemnity of the pre-war "rhythm clubs", and dancing, as in the authentic early jazz days, was encouraged.

There were, by the beginning of the 1950s, many bands at various levels of competence playing in the same idiom, but there was no question as to who was king. Although some of Humph's rhythm sections suffered from our national failing, a certain sogginess, the front line, and particularly when it recruited the late Keith Christie on trombone, was outstanding by any criteria. Those were euphoric nights.

Then, at the height of his success, but feeling that he was becoming trapped ("play-acting" he once described it), Humph introduced the late Bruce Turner on saxophone and gradually moved the band's idiom from the 1920s to the small-band "swing era" of the 1930s.

Not until Dylan went rock'n'roll was a change of musical policy greeted with such anger. In Birmingham when Humph introduced Bruce in 1953, a whole row of ex-fans raised a long banner reading "Go Home Dirty Bopper". His audience melted like snow.

Humph, who chose this moment to go professional (and in consequence, lost Fawkes, whose first commitment was to cartooning) was wryly amused by the accusation he had "gone commercial", a concept, he once told me, that would have perplexed his agent and bank manager.

Yet, admirably true to himself as he always was, Humph was never totally dependent on music for a living. He was at different times, as well as a cartoonist, a restaurant critic for Vogue, a regular columnist on Punch, and above all, a broadcaster. For nearly 40 years, from 1968 till his last programme in March, he presented The Best of Jazz on Radio 2 on Monday evening and, simultaneously chaired, with immaculate timing and sharp, hard-edged wit, the comedy panel game I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue on Radio 4, from 1972 onwards. He was also a brilliant after-dinner speaker.

Among his extramural interests were ornithology and, following his father's example, the practice of calligraphy. Yet it was always jazz that remained his true mistress, and at times she led him quite a dance. From the middle 1950s on, among his many experiments were adding no fewer than three saxophones (Go home dirty boppers!), a fusion of jazz and Afro-Cuban music (with Kenny Graham), and the formation in 1958 of a big band.

The outcome was not always happy. His sometime flirtation with the near-avant-garde showed him, rather than his employees, out of his depth, and even as a mainstream player, the replacement of Louis Armstrong by the great Kansas City trumpet player Buck Clayton as a principal influence failed to ignite Humph's own playing to anything like the same extent, or so it seemed to me.

Even so his change of direction did allow him to provide superb and suitable backing during the 1960s for touring American stars, including, among others, Clayton himself, the blues shouter Jimmy Rushing, and the gospel singer Sister Marie Knight. Humph, while steering clear of the "trad boom" under his own banner, was not against guesting occasionally in this profitable company, and indeed toured Australia in a show Salute to Sachmo (1978), with the late Alex Welsh. Greatly to his credit and perception was his realisation that Helen Shapiro, a teenage pop star of the 1950s, had the potential to become a first-class jazz singer.

Towards the end of his career, he settled for quite a large band with an eclectic repertoire, and many of the fine musicians were featured in solos, a device which allowed him to rest his own lip, naturally not quite what it was after so many decades of hard blowing and no coasting.

Humph, always courteous but a little aloof in his early days, became much more relaxed and friendly in his later years, and that most moderate of men had even been known to down the occasional Irish whiskey. However, he was never one to hang around. He blew and, when possible, drove home; he was never a night-owl.

His one constant source of irritation was the public's refusal to move with him as he explored jazz history. I met him once shortly after some anniversary at the 100 Club where, as far as possible, he had reconvened his original band, possibly including Wally Fawkes. It was packed, he told me and "some old fool" had told him he should play there more often. "I was here with my band," Humph snapped at him, "last Thursday." A good point, yet, while I would never have been so tactless, I understood what "the old fool" meant.

Humph's intransigence, his determination to "play as I please" was admirable: he was, like Ronnie Scott, the perfect ambassador for jazz, but, as another "old fool", for me he will always be that Pied Piper on the cusp of the 1950s, beating in Snake Rag in a magic cellar when we were young and didn't even know it.

His marriage to Patricia Braithwaite in 1948 ended in divorce. His subsequent marriage to Jill Richardson in 1952 ended with her death in 2006. He is survived by a daughter from the first marriage, and two sons and a daughter from the second.

· Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton, jazz musician, writer and broadcaster, born May 23 1921; died April 25 2008

· This obituary has been updated since George Melly's death last July