Carl Saunders's mastery is an extension of the Great American Songbook.

No, jazz is not dead after all. While a fairly recent Nielsen rating revealed that jazz listenership in America had sunk to a comatose low, I predict that the art form will survive well into the future, largely because of the public school system. This is where the mastery of jazz music is kept alive because it has become embedded in the curriculums of middle schools, high schools, and college campuses across the country. San Diego State University is no exception. There, Bill Yeager has been nurturing top-flight jazz musicians for years, even though no SDSU jazz studies grad will likely pay off their student loans by gigging. Schooling is more like it. When jazz tenor saxophonist Ben Schachter lived here, he once told the Reader, “That’s what people like me do to earn a living. We teach.”

As such, higher education is all about a love-fest with the golden years of jazz and bebop, and that’s precisely where jazz trumpet master Carl Saunders comes in. His mastery is an extension of the Great American Songbook, which is a collection of dozens of standards that most every jazz student learns but that few will ever own in the way that Saunders does. Now 74, he spent his formative years on the road: mom sang in the Bobby Sherwood Orchestra and with Stan Kenton. As a teen, Saunders picked up the trumpet, then drums, then went back to trumpet, and in short order he, too, landed up on the Kenton payroll for a couple of years during the early 1960s. Saunders worked in flashy Vegas showbands for the next 20 years, then launched his second career as a straight-ahead jazz trumpeter in L.A. A performer with endless resources, Saunders never repeats an idea or a phrase, even over 64 bars of soloing. And if planet Earth were fair, you could take that to the bank.

The SDSU Jazz Ensemble also performs.