Illinois Jacquet, who died yesterday aged 81, established his reputation as a tenor sax player with a single solo - a pungent, fruity performance on top of the chugging riffs of Lionel Hampton's Flying Home in 1942.

When Hampton selected him as soloist, 19-year-old Jacquet was so nervous that he asked his sax section leader how he should play, and received the advice that he should use his own style; to which Jacquet replied that he wasn't sure what that was.

But the resulting 64-bar solo became an immediate classic, which received the unique distinction (for such a long piece) of being copied by others and incorporated into subsequent orchestral versions.

In one of the ironies of a jazz career, Jacquet found himself not only constantly called to play the number again and again; he was driven to repeating it, note for note, so that audiences could congratulate themselves on their powers of recognition.

An important element in the solo's lasting popularity was that it was an early example of rhythm and blues and big band jazz being combined. Although Jacquet never became a pure rhythm-and-blues musician, he played an important role in helping the genre to achieve general popularity, so that it appealed to music lovers, and even electors.

He performed at the inaugurations of both President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan. His greatest presidential fan, however, was Bill Clinton, who liked to demonstrate his common touch by borrowing the Jacquet tenor when they met. At the inaugural ball held in the White House for the start of the Clinton presidency, the two performed C-Jam Blues together.

The son of a Creole railroad worker and a Sioux Indian, Jean Baptiste Jacquet was born at Broussard, Louisiana, on October 31 1922.

He was brought up at Houston, Texas, where he started playing the drums in high school, then learned the soprano and alto saxophones. Since nobody in Texas could manage French names he acquired the nickname Illiniwek, the Indian word for "superior man".

After playing with local bands, he and his trumpet-playing brother Russell moved to the West Coast with the leader, Floyd Ray. When Hampton left Benny Goodman in 1941 to form his full-time big band, he wanted the tenor player Arnett Cobb; but Cobb did not want to leave the Midwest, so he took Jacquet on the understanding that he learned the tenor.

After a year, Jacquet left Hampton's band, where he was replaced by Cobb, and joined the Cab Calloway orchestra in time for its appearance in the film Stormy Weather. He then took Lester Young's place with Count Basie, who was soon calling his new recruit "the king".

But it was while on a gig in Detroit that Jacquet came to realise that audiences were more interested in his playing than the performance of the band. He went freelance to work with such varied musicians as Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Nat King Cole, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

In 1946, he demonstrated his skill again in a memorable version of I Can't Get Started in which the two greatest tenor stars, Young and Coleman Hawkins, vied for superiority before Jacquet followed to demonstrate his unquestioned dominance in the number. It was true that as a solo star with the Norman Granz All-Star show, and later, when touring with various Hampton bands, Jacquet would let rip with wild abandon, occasionally dancing and lying on the floor, and wailing and squealing his way into his instrument's higher register.

His Blues from Louisiana, which demonstrates a rich variety of honks, whoops and growls, has become part of the jazz and R & B lexicon. But he never surrendered totally to sensationalism, and in later life he was notable for the restraint of his ballads. Significantly, his signature tune was You Left Me All Alone.

He made extensive tours of Europe, including a memorable visit to the Birmingham jazz festival in 1989, and also became the first jazz artist-in-residence at Harvard University. His great regret was that his status as a solo star discouraged backers from financing his own big bands, which gave him the freedom he craved to arrange and compose.

Jacquet could never explain the success of the Flying Home solo, beyond saying that it was like a religious experience. "Something was with me," he would recall. "It all came together."

Illinois B Jacquet