Bertie King has been played on NTS shows including Questing w/ Zakia, with Mango Walk first played on 25 August 2024.

Albert "Bertie" King (Colon, Panama, June 19, 1912 – 1981) was a Jamaican jazz and mento musician who was a saxophonist.

King was born in Panama, and raised in Kingston, where he attended Alpha Boys' School; there he was taught by Sister Mary Ignatius Davis, a remarkable woman who nurtured the talents of many of the leading Jamaican musicians of the era. During the 1930s he led his own band, Bertie King and his Rhythm Aces, described at the time as "Jamaica's Foremost Dance Orchestra". In 1936 he left for England, sailing on the same ship as his friend Jiver Hutchinson. In London he joined Ken Snakehips Johnson's West Indian Dance Band, and later played with Leslie Hutchinson's band. He also worked with visiting American musicians including Benny Carter, George Shearing and Coleman Hawkins. In 1937 he recorded four sides in the Netherlands with Benny Carter, and in 1938 he recorded with Django Reinhardt in Paris. In 1939 he joined the Royal Navy. He left the Navy in 1943 and formed his own band, also working and recording with Nat Gonella. King returned to Jamaica in 1951, where he started his own band, known as the Casa Blanca Orchestra, playing in the mento style. Since there were no Jamaican record labels at this time, he arranged for his recordings to be pressed in a plant in Lewisham, England, owned by Decca Records. He returned a number of times to England, working and recording with Kenny Baker, George Chisholm, Chris Barber, Kenny Graham and Humphrey Lyttelton, and also toured in Asia and Africa with his own band. During this period he also played and recorded in London with some of the leading Trinidadian calypsonians. He was noted for his impassive demeanour on stage, which belied an expressive playing style. King led the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation's house band in the 1950s; his sidemen included Ernest Ranglin and Tommy Mowatt. He recorded extensively with this outfit. In 1965 he moved to the USA. His last known public performance was at Jamaican Independence Day celebrations in New York in 1967. He died in the USA in 1981.

Bertie King was born in Colon, Panama on 19th June, 1912. He moved with his family to Jamaica at the age of 16 and proved to be a talented saxophone and clarinet player. He came to the UK in January, 1936 at a time when there was a contingent of West Indian musicians supplying the 'coloured' club scene in London with jazz and swing music. King went straight into the Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson West Indian Dance Band, generally reckoned to be the best swing band in London at the time. Although Johnson played swing on the radio and in the clubs his records were more commercial and do not capture the vitality of the band. King was in demand elsewhere and played with both Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter in the late 1930s before joining the Royal Navy at the start of the second world war in December, 1940. Invalided out of the Navy in 1943 he worked with a string of top bands including Joe Loss, Geraldo and Eric Winstone before forming his own band in 1943. From 1944 he worked with the swing band of Leslie 'Jiver' Hutchinson until 1946 when he went on tour with the popular Blue Rockets, formerley a section within the George Melachrino Orchestra.

After a couple more years on the dance band circuit he started to freelance in London including a spell with Harry Parry and also led a ten piece all-black band on a BBC Jazz Club broadcast. Through the 1950s he had periods working alternately in Montego Bay in the West Indies and London and had a few record dates with his own band as well as recording with Kenny Baker, Kenny Graham and the Jazz Today Unit. He toured with his own band in Singapore, India and New Zealand before returning to the UK until November, 1958 when he returned to Jamaica until August, 1963. On returning to London in November he freelanced until in1967 he left the music business and moved to the USA. In 1981, while managing a condominium in California, he was the victim of a violent, fatal assault.