Swing Savant’s Repertoire Knows No Boundaries : Jazz: The ensemble, playing tonight in Huntington Beach, addresses every era while staying within the ‘30s genre.

“Bob Crosby on LSD.”

That’s just one of the ways that saxophonist-arranger Tom Kubis describes Swing Savant, the eight-piece traditional jazz ensemble he co-leads with drummer Matt Johnson.

The band plays selections that originated in the United States between 1900 and 1940, and “the music goes through a lot of bumps and grinds as we kind of address every era,” Kubis, 41, said on the phone from his home in Huntington Beach. “Like there will be-bop in the middle of a piece, or something from the ‘90s, but all within the genre of the ‘20s and ‘30s.”

He ain’t lying. On the band’s debut cassette (on Ad Lib Records), Swing Savant plays “That’s a-Plenty,” first recorded by the New Orleans Rhythms Kings in 1923, and in the middle of it the group suddenly inserts a portion of the James Bond movie theme, over which trumpeter Rusty Stiers adds biting wah-wah statements.

Later during the number, the band--which plays tonight at Golden West College in Huntington Beach and every Monday through September at Mucho Gusto in Costa Mesa--delivers big band riffs that reek of Count Basie. Snappy ‘60s-’70s ensemble writing brightens up the already peppy “Copenhagen,” another tune from the New Orleans Rhythms Kings repertoire, first recorded in 1922.

Johnson hopes this vaulting-across-musical-boundaries approach, and the fact that the band members are in their 30s and 40s, will bring Swing Savant to a younger audience than typically follows traditional jazz (people in their 50s, 60s and 70s).

“This music has been stigmatized by only our elders playing it,” said Johnson, who’s 31. “So people think of it as groups of retired guys wearing white pants and white belts and white shoes, jamming. We don’t want our generation to feel alienated. The music we play is completely viable and fresh, and our band has the ability to present it to younger people in a positive way.”

Kubis and Johnson, who first played together in the early ‘80s at Disneyland in a Dixie band called the Jazz Minors, have been drawn to traditional jazz all their lives.

“My dad, who was the fire marshal for the city of Orange for 30 years, played drums in a Dixieland band,” said Johnson, who attended Orange High School, then Fullerton College. “He and his friends were all firemen, and they were bugged at the ‘Firehouse Five Plus Two’ band because they weren’t really firemen, so they formed a band called ‘The Hook and Ladder Lads.’ So I’ve been listening to early jazz since I was a kid.”

“My folks were fans of music of the ‘40s, and my dad was a big fan of cornetist Wild Bill Davison, guitarist Eddie Condon and the Firehouse Five,” said Kubis, a Huntington Beach native. “My parents used to take me to jazz clubs when I was about 12, and I started playing with bands at that age. In fact, I played with Wild Bill when I was teen-ager. So it’s been a lifelong thing.”

The Jazz Minors also featured current Savant members Stiers, bassist-tuba player Eric Messerschmidt and guitarist-banjoist Brad Roth. Memories of that band sparked the formation of the present aggregation.

“One day we said, ‘Let’s call a rehearsal and play that Jazz Minor book,’ ” Kubis recalls. “We did, and then I decided to write some charts,” and Swing Savant was born. Both Kubis and Johnson felt there was a market for this kind of band, and they’ve been proven correct. When it played the Indian Wells Jazz festival last New Years, Savant was booked for an additional 10 traditional jazz fests, including the Los Angeles Classic Jazz Festival in September. And Johnson says the response at Mucho Gusto every week has been very upbeat.

But they love just playing in the band. “I’m having an absolute ball,” Kubis said.

* Swing Savant plays tonight at 7:30 in the outdoor amphitheater at Golden West College, 15744 Golden West St., Huntington Beach ($7, (714) 895-8378) and Mondays through September at 8:30 p.m. at Mucho Gusto, 263 E. 17th. St., Costa Mesa. (714) 631-4009.