Park resident Tom Saunders dies;
was Detroit jazz legend

Cornetist/trumpeter Tom Saunders died Saturday (Feb. 13). He was 71.
 

Saunders, a leading figure of Detroit's traditional jazz scene for more than 40 years, played regularly at jazz festivals throughout the United States and Europe. He was best known recently as the leader of the Detroit Jazz All-Stars. The group was a fixture at Marge's Bar and Grill in the Park, where Saunders was known as much for his sense of humor and prolific joke-telling as he was for his Dixieland-influenced style.  

A lifelong resident of Grosse Pointe Park, Saunders, legend has it, first picked up his brother's cornet at age 7 and never gave it back. The story goes that at 9 he was playing second cornet in his brother's band and at 13 had his own group – participating in battles of the bands at the War Memorial, where he was better known for his mischief than his music. 

Following a three-year stint in the Navy, Saunders went on to tour with Pee Wee Hunt and eventually recorded and toured with his childhood hero, Wild Bill Davison. Tom has cited listening to Davison's Dixieland-influenced, Chicago-style hot jazz as the primary influence on his own style. 

"I couldn't get enough of his sound," Saunders told the Detroit Free Press in 2008, "He played with so much fire. I said, 'Man, that's what I want to do.'" 

In the 1960s and '70s, Saunders formed the Surfside Six and played local nightspots including the Surfside Lounge on East Jefferson and the Dearborn Town House. When the jazz nightclub scene declined in the 1980s, Saunders made the transition to touring as a solo "name" artist and bandleader playing annually at jazz festivals, societies and parties.

"He was a living link to jazz's greatest era," says John Denomme, producer of Music on the Plaza, the summer concert series in the Village, where Saunders performed regularly. "Tom was a brilliant musician and bandleader who could have abandoned his career as a musician at any time and taken up standup comedy. He will be missed."

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