Tito Burns obituary

Jazz bandleader turned pop manager and booking agent
Tito Burns
Tito Burns, right, with his future wife, Terry Devon, accompanied by his band at the Wimbledon Palais in 1949 Photograph: Peter Vacher Collection

Tito Burns, who has died of prostate cancer aged 89, was one of the last of a generation of British jazz musicians, including Pete King of Ronnie Scott's club and the northern swing trumpeter Ernie Garside, who successfully made the switch from performance to management and promotional roles. Burns made a particularly high-profile job of it. He initially represented his former colleagues in jazz after 1955, but then managed several British rock acts, including the young Cliff Richard.

Nathan "Tito" Bernstein was born in north London and began performing as a semi-pro accordionist during the 1930s. He combined a sharp ear for the phrasing of many popular idioms with a relaxed swing and a natural leader's drive. His first gig was with Felix Mendelssohn's Hawaiian-influenced group, followed by work with the Cuban bandleader Don Marino Barreto, the tango pianist Lou Preager and the Trinidadian clarinetist Carl Barriteau.

By 1941 Burns was leading his own band at the Panama club. Though his musical career was diverted by service with the RAF in the far east, he continued to play as part of the RAF regiment sextet. After being wounded, he became a radio broadcaster for the Allied forces' Radio SEAC in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He joined the West Indian "rumba king" Clarrie Wears after demobilisation in 1946.

It was from 1947 that Burns's career as a leader took off. The new generation of British jazz players was fascinated by the commercial and artistic balance struck by the American "bop for the people" band of saxophonist Charlie Ventura, which combined the songlike lyricism of the swing players with some of the new intricacies of bebop. Burns took to this formula at once, and developed his own bop technique for the accordion.

In January 1947 he formed the Tito Burns Sextet and recruited several of London's leading young modernists, including the guitarist Pete Chilver, the vibraphonist Tommy Pollard, the drummers Tony Crombie and Ray Ellington, and later the saxophonists Scott and John Dankworth. The repertoire included such contemporary jazz classics as Dizzy Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia, and while Burns kept the jazz content on a tight leash, the group's unusual yet highly accessible sound quickly caught the ear of the public.

The BBC producer Charles Chilton invited Burns to host its Accordion Club radio show, and the band developed a wide following. Scott was later to observe that "British bebop" did not begin in 1948 at the co-operatively-run Club Eleven as widely believed, but a year earlier with the formation of the Tito Burns Sextet. The group is generally credited with performing the first bebop tunes to be heard on BBC radio.

Burns married his longtime girlfriend, the jazz and session singer Terry Devon, whose elegant harmonising blended successfully into the group in the early 50s. Burns found it impossible to keep the band on the road with a jazz repertoire alone and was forced to introduce more pop material. His star soloists left to plough jazzier furrows, and though in May 1955 the leader attempted a last throw with an expanded group he named his New Big Orchestra, he called it a day the same year and moved into management.

Burns worked with jazz musicians at first, but in 1959 he became Cliff Richard's manager, and later acquired the Springfields (who included Dusty Springfield), the Zombies and Cat Stevens. He had learned to drive a hard bargain, and not all of his charges (notably the Searchers) came to view their professional relationship with him favourably, but Burns's time as a musician gave him a better understanding of his artists than most of his colleagues. Burns also served as a booking agent for the Rolling Stones, Roy Orbison and the Moody Blues.

In the late 1960s Burns became head of variety programming at London Weekend Television. He continued to give opportunities to promising jazz artists, such as the trumpet virtuoso Maynard Ferguson, whose band he signed to play on LWT's Simon Dee chatshow. An emerging American standup, Woody Allen, was also a Burns booking. He handled Simon and Garfunkel's 1970 shows at the Royal Albert Hall, as well as Bob Dylan's first European tour (Burns's hard bargaining was captured in DA Pennebaker's 1967 Dylan documentary Don't Look Back).

In October 1971, though he remained an LWT shareholder, Burns went into partnership with the Scotia leisure group to form Scotia-Tito Burns, an organisation dealing in music publishing, talent-spotting, recording, TV production, movie scores and concert and record promotion. He observed to Billboard at the time that launching a new performer in an increasingly eclectic showbiz environment "has got to give you sleepless nights, and probably ulcers as well. You've got to build your own stars."

In 1977 Burns was involved in the founding of what became the Brit awards, which were presented at the Wembley Conference Centre to artists who had made outstanding contributions to recorded music since 1952. He kept active in the business throughout the 1980s, primarily managing Victor Borge in his stage shows and voiceovers for Heineken lager TV advertisements.

He is survived by Terry, his daughters Linda and Sharon, and his grandchildren Josh and Ethan.

Tito Burns (Nathan Bernstein), musician and promoter, born 7 February 1921; died 23 August 2010