When Ruby Braff, who has died aged 75, toured Britain last summer, he looked as if he wouldn't make it from one gig to the next. But the moment he lifted the cornet to his lips, all thoughts of frailty and mortality evaporated.He sounded wonderful, his tone gleaming, his phrasing graceful and balanced, his ideas spirited and fresh. Everything he played was an affirmation of life and hope.
Braff's trip happened in the same year that the 75th birthdays of the late Miles Davis and John Coltrane were being celebrated. The contrast between their ambiguous harmonies, unpredictable turns and precipice-edge strivings, and his vivacious, singing sound was a startling reminder of the generation gap between players of the same age.
Braff came to jazz in early 1950s Boston, when almost every east coast trumpeter wanted to sound like a modernist bebopper. Not Ruby. He loved the sound of musicians who had made their reputations 20 years before him - men like Louis Armstrong and Bobby Hackett. He once said that what his music represented was simply "adoration of the melody".
Way into his 70s, he was still doing just that, every silvery phrase as clear and confident as it had been 40 years before - his tone in the low register, barely resembling a brass instrument at all and sometimes compared to a cello, was one of the wonders of jazz. His technical agility seemed effortless, but was always in the service of the tune. And though he avoided the more devious routes of bebop, his harmonic sense was more advanced than that of many of the older players who had inspired him.
Braff was born in Boston, and was musically self-taught. He performed for parties and at clubs around the city in the 1940s, joined the bands of clarinetists Edmond Hall and Pee Wee Russell in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and, in 1953, moved to New York, where his inventive fluency brought him work with traditional and modern bands alike.
He joined the septet of the warm-toned trombonist Vic Dickenson, as well as groups led by brass players Buck Clayton and Urbie Green, and began to lead bands of his own. Swing musicians, such as Bud Freeman and Benny Goodman, hired him and, in 1956, he appeared in a jazz-themed television play, The Magic Horn.
Though Braff was out of step with jazz fashions in the later 1950s - and periodically out of work as a result - he made a succession of excellent recordings, notably a Billie Holiday tribute, Holiday In Braff, and an exuberant partnership with Roy Eldridge, Easy Now!
The term "mainstream jazz" was coined by the critic Stanley Dance in this period, mainly to wrap a name around some widely admired sessions featuring various sub-groups of the Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman bands - and to distinguish a kind of sophisticated swing from bop and traditional jazz.
Braff was now in his element. He began working with pianist George Wein's Newport All Stars, and very fruitfully with pianists Ralph Sutton and Ellis Larkins, and he started to tour more widely, often playing with Scottish trumpeter Alex Welsh's lively ensemble when in Britain.
From 1973, he worked in regular partnership with guitarist George Barnes, rhythm guitarist Wayne Wright and bassist Michael Moore, producing some of the most exquisitely crafted music of the mainstream movement - and some of the most inspired, small-band performances in the history of jazz. They also made superb recordings for Concord, and worked with singer Tony Bennett.
But long musical associations were not Braff's style. Contrary, demanding and difficult to please, he fell out with friends and associates throughout his life - musicians called him "Mr Hyde and Mr Hyde" - and the George Barnes group became a casualty of his short fuse. So Braff went back to running things his way, though by now with an assured international reputation.
He also performed with pianists Dave McKenna and Dick Hyman, participating in the latter's New York Jazz Repertory Company (notably on a tribute to Louis Armstrong in November 1974), and he was a significant figure in the Concord label's role in consolidating mainstream jazz. In this context, Braff also managed a steady association, from 1982, with the tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton - like him, a player who had elected to inhabit an earlier jazz world.
From the early 1990s, Braff also began working for the Arbors label. In that decade he became more imaginative and inventive than ever - the melody lines of saxophonists seemed to replace those of brass-players as his inspiration - and he made a series of scintillating records with the cream of the mainstream scene. Though serious illnesses seemed likely to end his career, in 1994 he successfully returned to the road.
Ruby Braff may not have joined the household-name category of Louis Armstrong (his most significant influence), Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, nor did he shift the evolutionary course of the music. But he was one of the finest practitioners of his instrument, gifted with a rare fertility of ideas and an unerring control of their direction and shape.
The way he would skitter playfully around a melody, steady himself with spare, carefully poised sounds, brightly attack an improvisation as good as the original, hold shimmering long notes, or duck in and out of a different tune, was endlessly fascinating.
He never married.
· Reuben 'Ruby' Braff, cornetist, born March 16 1927; died February 9 2003