After 30 years in San Francisco, jazz pianist Dick Whittington made Big Sur his home and brings standards to Carmel.

If you’ve lived in Monterey County awhile and like jazz music, no doubt you’ve heard Dick Whittington play the piano, or at least heard his name. He grew up in L.A. with early musical direction from his father, a Vaudeville musician who specialized in Dixieland. The house was filled with the music of the heyday of the big band jazz era – Basie, Ellington, Nat King Cole. His first and only instrument is piano, which he first pecked at age 5. By 7 he was picking out boogie woogie tunes by ear.

“I think jazz found everybody during that time,” Whittington says. “Even the pop music of the time was heavily jazz-influenced. Something would come on the radio and I would go to the piano and see how much of it I could figure out.”

Two events in his teens were seminal in shaping a future musical career. “What really turned me on were my father’s 78s of Art Tatum,” he says. “That really turned my head around as far as realizing what the piano could do.”

The other was meeting up with a teacher named Sam Saxe in Hollywood when he was 16.

“Sam taught keyboard harmony and improvisation by transcribing the solos of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and other great jazz players,” Whittington says. “He was more like a coach than a teacher. He had this library of these transcribed solos and would hand you a few to learn. His idea was to prepare for playing jobs by learning these solos, because he believed that playing out on gigs was where you really began to learn.”

Whittington moved north in 1961 when a tour with legendary sax man Dexter Gordon ended at the SF Jazz Workshop club. He spent the next 30 years teaching jazz education in Berkeley public schools.

“It was like a farm team, like the minors in pro baseball,” Whittington says. “The kids started young. By high school they were accomplished jazz musicians.”

Whittington came to Monterey County in 1996, and landed in Big Sur 2004.

These days he is a freelancer, surfacing a few times a year in the Bay Area and occasionally here closer to home. One such outing occurs this weekend, when Whittington joins up with Santa Cruz guitar ace Bob Basa at the intimate Carl Cherry Center. Whittington calls the venue “an undiscovered gem.”

Expect a big range of styles: “Bob is especially well-versed in authentic Brazilian and Latin music. We do a nice mixture of American interpretations of bossa nova along with jazz standards, blues, a little bit of everything.”

JAZZ AT THE CHERRY with DICK WHITTINGTON and BOB BASA 3-5pm Sunday, April 8. Carl Cherry Center, Fourth and Guadalupe, Carmel. $15. 624-7491, brownpapertickets.com