Edmundo Ros OBE, FRAM (7 December 1910 – 21 October 2011),[1][2] born Edmund William Ross, was a Trinidadian-Venezuelan musician, vocalist, arranger and bandleader who made his career in Britain.

[1] His mother, Luisa Urquart, was a Venezuelan teacher, thought to be descended from indigenous Caribs, and his father, William Hope-Ross, was a mulatto of Scottish descent.

[3] When his mother became involved with a man he loathed and had a son by him, the 17-year-old left for Caracas, Venezuela, to study at the Academy of Music under Vicente Emilio Sojo.

He played drums in the city's nightclubs and in the Martial Band of Caracas, and he was soon hired by Sojo as timpanist in the new Venezuela Symphony Orchestra.

[4] At the same time he was the vocalist and percussionist in Don Marino Barreto's band at the Embassy Club, and also recorded several sides as a sideman to Fats Waller, who was visiting London in 1938.

The band played regularly at the Coconut Grove club in Regent Street, attracting members of London's high society and royal family.

[3] All the leaders of Allied Countries in World War II and the Royal Family came there to dine and listen to Edmundo's Rumba Band.

By then, with his gently rhythmic style and engaging vocals, he was enormously popular with the public generally, and his orchestra was often invited to play at Buckingham Palace.

[5] In 1950, King George VI invited him to perform at Windsor, and he took his fiancée,[9] the beautiful Swedish aristocrat Britt Johansen, whom he married that year.

In 2000, the composer Michael Nyman produced a BBC TV documentary about him entitled I Sold My Cadillac to Diana Dors, and described him as: "One of the few black men to have attained national recognition; he hadn't gone for 'the gorblimeys', he wanted to be a gentleman, the greatest satisfaction you can earn in England."

In the 2000 New Year Honours, Ros (then aged 90) was appointed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

Although the title of these CDs calls his group the Rumba Band, in the post-war period it expanded to 16 members, and was known as Edmundo Ros and his Orchestra.