My friend the trumpeter Reg Service, who has died aged 93, was one of a small but significant group of black Britons who played jazz and swing music in the UK before the second world war.He grew up in Streatham, south London, the son of Mabel Moore, a white English mother from Maidstone, Kent, and Richard Service, a Jamaican engineer who left the country when Reg was nine months old. At the Strand school in Brixton Hill, Reg played the trumpet and formed a band with classmates including the tru...
Guardian Music — My friend the trumpeter Reg Service, who has died aged 93, was one of a small but significant group of black Britons who played jazz and swing music in the UK before the... more info