Veteran players Carl Saunders and Pete Christlieb continue their families’ traditions.

If ever a man were born to the horn, it was trumpeter Carl Saunders. The Los Angeles-based jazz great was raised amidst music, and he decided to follow the family vocation. Saunders performs on Saturday at the Jazz & Blues Company with a world-class LA band featuring tenor sax great Pete Christlieb, bassist Dave Carpenter, pianist Mike Lang and drummer Kim Edmunson (a Peninsula resident who retains strong ties to the Southern California scene where he thrived for decades).

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the trumpeter’s musical initiation started in utero. He spent the first five years of his life on the road with his uncle’s big band, the Bobby Sherwood Orchestra, which scored the swing-era hits “Sherwood’s Forrest” and “The Elks Parade.” Saunders’ mother, Gail Landis, was the vocalist with her brother’s band and later became the first singer with the Stan Kenton Orchestra.

“I remember standing in the wings of the theaters waiting for my mom to come off the stand, and watching my uncle playing trumpet and singing,” said Saunders, 64, from his home in LA. “But when the big-band era came to a close, my uncle broke the band up and my mom got out of the music business to keep me out of it.”

By junior high, however, Saunders was enamored with the trumpet, a passion stoked by listening to classic octet recordings by his other uncle, West Coast tenor saxophonist Dave Pell. Years later, Saunders ended up taking over the trumpet chair in Pell’s band once held by the supremely lyrical Don Fagerquist, whose playing had first inspired him.

The trumpeter landed his first high-profile gig right out of high school, when his mom paid a visit to Kenton, whose orchestra was performing at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, where she and Saunders had settled.

“My mom went down to talk to Stan and got me an audition with the band, and I went out with the orchestra playing mellophonium during his mellophonium era,” Saunders said. “I was on the road for about two years. It was my first job, so I started at the top. That was my college.”

He spent 25 years as a Las Vegas musician, working in shows and backing singers. But when synthesizers started replacing musicians in the early 1980s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he immersed himself in the jazz scene, playing first trumpet with the prodigious Bill Holman Orchestra, a talent-laden band that showcases Pete Christlieb’s tenor sax work.

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Christlieb hails from a similarly eminent musical family. His father, Don Christlieb, was a legendary double-reed virtuoso whose bassoon and oboe work was featured for three decades in the 20th Century Fox Studio Orchestra. A protégé of Lighthouse All-Star tenor saxophone star Bob Cooper, Pete started sitting in at the famous Hermosa Beach jazzspot in the early 1960s, and before long stepped in for Cooper, who left for a job on “The Dean Martin Show.”

Christlieb had grown up listening to the Lighthouse All-Stars’ albums featuring the cream of the West Coast scene, such as trumpeter Shorty Rogers, saxophonist Bud Shank, pianist Hampton Hawes and drummer Shelly Manne. The only first-generation All-Star left when Christlieb joined was bandleader/bassist Howard Rumsey, but the Lighthouse was a still a musical hotbed.

“That was the most thrilling thing,” says Christlieb, 61. “I’m working there on weeknights, and the hot guys from out of town are coming in on the weekends. I met all these guys and got to play with them, and I ended up doing albums with Sonny Criss and Freddie Hubbard. It’s all about being at the right place at the right time.”

Christlieb’s career has been marked by a succession of felicitous relationships. A longtime member of Louie Bellson’s circle, Christlieb landed a gig with the old “Tonight Show” band when the drummer recommended him. As a busy studio musician, the saxophonist has played on thousands of pop sessions, jingles and film scores. He even had an 18-year intergalactic ride playing on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a gig that he was sad to see end. “I guess there’s no more tenor saxophone in space,” Christlieb quips.

With his big, muscular sound and rip-roaring rhythmic attack, Christlieb is widely revered by his peers, though largely ignored by the jazz press. He did seize the limelight in 1978 when Walter Becker and Donald Fagin, at the height of their success with Steely Dan, produced the stellar Warner Bros. album >>Apogee, which paired Christlieb with the brilliant but unsung tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh.

Over the years he’s collaborated with some of jazz’s finest trumpeters, from Snooky Young, Conte Condoli and Bill Berry to Freddie Hubbard, Blue Mitchell and Donald Byrd, so when Christlieb praises his Sunday co-leader Carl Saunders, it’s not to be taken lightly.

“Carl’s amazing, the things that he does. I’ve played with a lot of great trumpeters. I worked with Chet Baker too,” Christlieb says, referring to the notoriously unreliable hornman. “But Carl doesn’t owe me $300.”  

THE CARL SAUNDERS ALL-STAR QUINTET featuring Pete Christlieb performs Saturday, Feb. 4, at 7:30pm at The Jazz & Blues Company, the Eastwood Building, San Carlos and Fifth, Carmel. $40. 624-6432 or thejazzandbluescompany.com.