Reginald Foresythe

Reginald Foresythe (28 May 1907 - 28 December 1958) was a British jazz pianist, arranger, composer, and bandleader.

Foresythe was born and died in London. His father was a West African barrister of Sierra Leone Creole descent and his mother was an Englishwoman of German descent. The Foresythe family descended from Charles Foresythe, a Sierra Leonean colonial official who settled in Lagos, Nigeria in the 1860s. Charles Foresythe was born in the early nineteenth century to a European army captain and a mother from Tasso Island, Sierra Leone.

He played piano from age eight, and worked in the second half of the 1920s as a pianist and accordionist in dance bands in Paris, Australia, Hawaii, and California. He also wrote music for films by D.W. Griffith, among others, and played in Paul Howard's Quality Serenaders. In 1930 Foresythe moved to Chicago.

Earl Hines made one of his songs, "Deep Forest," a regular part of his repertory, and Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Adrian Rollini, Paul Whiteman and Hal Kemp recorded Foresythe compositions. He worked in New York City in 1934-35, arranging for Paul Whiteman and recording with Benny Goodman, John Kirby, and Gene Krupa. However, he spent much of his career on the dance band scene in Britain, later serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II and working as an accompanist to vocalists and a solo pianist in London in the 1950s.

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