Ken Rattenbury (10 September 1920 – 9 April 2001) was an English jazz trumpeter, pianist and composer and author born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire to Sidney, a postmaster.
While in the Service, he took up the trumpet and toured the European Theatre of World War II leading his own band.
During 1963 and 1964, he composed and broadcast two thirty-minute jazz suites, The Seven Ages of Man and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and again had some of the greats of jazz play with him, Kenny Baker and had Michael Hordern reciting the famous Shakespearean soliloquy, "All the world's a stage ..." in the Seven Ages suite.
He then worked for EMI to produce full-length albums of incidental music to stories by Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm.
Rattenbury is most notable for his Duke Ellington biography, but also had been commissioned by the BBC in the 1960s to compose two half-hour jazz suites titled The Seven Ages of Man and The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.