GENTLEMAN jazz player and Radio 4 panel-game presenter Humphrey Lyttelton is sorry but he hasn't a clue when he last played in York.

"Oh goodness, I really don't know. It would be two or three years ago, though I have to look at my diary to see where I was yesterday," he says, in that world-weary yet dryly amused voice so familiar from his radio shows.

Humphrey soon will start recording a new series of I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue for May and June broadcast, but before then his voice and his trumpet skills can be heard tomorrow at York Theatre Royal in the company of his seven-piece band.

"We probably do 50-52 shows a year. The winter months from December, sometimes through to March and April, are quiet but I particularly like the summer months when we do the arts festivals and play outdoors.

"I'm not talking about jazz festivals, which can be OK, but sometimes you find yourself playing in a police recreation hall if big American bands are playing the main hall."

Humphrey enjoys regular routine, be it presenting The Best Of Jazz since 1967 or I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue since 1972 or performing with his band once a month at the Bull's Head in Barnes.

"It's on the Thames by Barnes railway bridge, and jazz must have been going on there for 40-odd years. We've played there for more than 30 years; there are gigs every night and it's one of the unsung venues of the jazz circuit," he says.

"People go on about the Ronnie Scott's and the 100 Club, but in those 40 years at the Bull's Head, there have been only two managers, always putting on jazz. At the moment, you can't squeeze in an extra person by the time we start at 8.30."

His love of jazz dates from his early teens. "I used to listen in the early 1930s to the dance band programmes that were broadcast from the Mayfair Hotel with Harry Roy.

"American jazz had been filtering into our music in the Twenties and Thirties, and I remember hearing the trumpeter Nat Gonella, who was of Italian stock but was pure East End by the time they got to him," says Humphrey.

"He was the first to adapt and play and sing in the Louis Armstrong manner. I heard that trumpet and I thought 'That's what I want to do' - and I still feel affection for his records."

So, the trumpet it was. "When my mother went round the shops with me, saying 'Wouldn't it be nicer if you played something softer like the clarinet, I insisted on the trumpet

"I would point it in the direction of the heavens, thinking I wanted to play like Louis Armstrong, but it was only when I played that way that I discovered all the spittle comes back towards you and you can't play.

"Louis Armstrong only did it in the movies," says Humphrey.

At present he is combining his radio and concert work with another challenge.

"I'm writing a book of thoughts and anecdotes... and anything that comes into my mind.

"At the moment, the title is The Thoughts Of Chairman Humph, which came to mind because I chair I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue," he says.

For more thoughts of chairman Humph, see tomorrow's 7.30pm show, but hurry because tickets have almost sold out, apart from in the gallery where there is limited availability. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 08:46 Friday, April 16, 2004