Peter John King (11 August 1940 – 23 August 2020) was an English jazz saxophonist, composer, and clarinettist. Early life Peter King was born in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England. He took up the clarinet and saxophone as a teenager, entirely self-taught. His first public appearances were in 1957, playing alto in a trad jazz group at the Swan Public House, Kingston, in a group organised by trumpeter Alan Rosewell, with whom he worked at the Directorate of Overseas Surveys as an apprentice cartographer. After the performance, however, King made the choice of becoming a professional musician. He came under the strong musical influence of Charlie Parker developing a bebop style inspired by Parker. Career In 1959, at the age of 19, he was booked by Ronnie Scott to perform at the opening of Scott's club in Gerrard Street, London. In the same year, he received the Melody Maker New Star award. He worked with Johnny Dankworth's orchestra from 1960 to 1961, and went on to work with the big bands of Maynard Ferguson, Tubby Hayes, Harry South, and Stan Tracey, the Brussels Big Band, and the Ray Charles band on a European tour. He also played in small groups with musicians such as Philly Joe Jones, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Red Rodney, Hampton Hawes, Nat Adderley, Al Haig, John Burch, Bill Watrous, and Dick Morrissey, Tony Kinsey, Bill Le Sage and singers such as Jimmy Witherspoon, Joe Williams, Jon Hendricks, and Anita O'Day. His powerful and exuberant bebop style with great technical facility, often led to comparisons with the style of his close friend the American altoist Phil Woods, although King's playing was increasingly personal and distinctive even within the bebop idiom. His musical curiosity led him to associate with freer idioms in John Stevens' 'Freebop' group in the 1980s. He appeared on the soundtrack of the 1969 film The Italian Job. He was a member of Charlie Watts' Tentet. Especially from the early 1990s, his style matured into a highly confident originality, going far beyond its initial Parker influences and absorbing harmonic and structural ideas from his favourite classical composer Bela Bartok. He flourished both as an improviser and a composer and found ways of combining jazz and classical techniques without diluting either. The results of this development were heard especially on his albums Tamburello (recorded in 1994), Lush Life (recorded 1998) and Janus with the Lyric String