English composer and multi-instrumentalist who founded the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

Because his father's work entailed many foreign postings, his early life was spent on the move around Canada and Europe. While at English boarding school, aged 12, Jeffes heard a guitar being played and was riveted. He played in an R&B band at school and when he left he studied classical guitar and music theory at music college.

Swiftly disillusioned with the factory-like conditions in which he was being taught, Jeffes dropped out and joined a 10-piece avant garde guitar ensemble, Gilberto Biberian's Omega Players, only to find that also rather stifling. So he turned to rock, working with producer Rupert Hine on music for films as well as Hine's first two solo albums, Pick Up A Bone (1970) and Unfinished Picture (1971).

In 1972, Jeffes got on the Trans Siberian Railway and spent 4 months in Japan. This was where he first became interested in ethnic music, particularly African, which he discovered on a cassette tape made up by a friend. And so began his plan to merge exotic folk music with his other more westernised interests within a previously unenvisaged ensemble.

A decade passed before this aspiration became a practical, economic reality. For the rest of the 1970s, alongside his Penguin activities, Jeffes carried on working as a freelance producer and arranger, working with a rich mix of artists from Caravan and Rod Argent to Yvonne Elliman and the 101-ers. His best remembered work from this period is probably the string arrangement he contributed to Sid Vicious's version of My Way. He also developed an extraordinarily wide range of musical tastes, ranging from soul music to John Cage to world music.

The PCO formed in Jeffes' mind as a result of a dream-like vision he experienced during a severe bout of food poisoning in the South of France during the summer of 1972. Jeffes always conceived his Orchestra to be a fluctuating unit rather than a tightly cast group. Aside from one other founder member, the cellist Helen Liebmann, there were no regular performers and dozens of players passed though the Orchestra's ranks in the 24 years of its life.

Jeffes died of an inoperable brain tumour in December 1997.