In a culture obsessed with youth, let’s take a minute to appreciate the virtues of experience and maturity. This week brings three veteran jazz performers on the verge of turning 80 to the Sunset Center, artists who have been at the top of their profession for more than half a century.

Trumpeter Doc Severinson and His Big Band hold forth Thursday, Feb. 22, while vocalist Dame Cleo Laine and her husband and music director, saxophonist Sir John Dankworth, lead a combo on Tuesday. Let’s start with the Dame.

Born in London, Laine started singing with Dankworth, a gifted altoist and clarinetist with a real affinity for bebop, in the early 1950s. By the time they married in 1958, Dankworth had assembled one of the UK’s most popular jazz combos. With her lovely, clear voice and multi-octave range, she established herself as a natural interpreter of American Songbook standards and jazz material associated with Duke Ellington and Count Basie. At the same time, Laine started to distinguish herself in the theater, gaining strong reviews for her work in the 1959 musical Valmouth, and the 1962 play A Time to Laugh with Robert Morley and Ruth Gordon.

Her two careers converged in the early ‘60s, when she scored a British Top Ten hit with “You’ll Answer to Me” while she was starring in an acclaimed Edinburgh Festival production of Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins. She and Dankworth made their own artistic statement in 1964 with the album Shakespeare and All that Jazz, which set the Bard’s poetry to lightly swinging jazz arrangements.

Laine’s musical theater career continued in the US, with starring roles in A Little Night Music and a Michigan Opera production of The Merry Widow. She garnered a Tony nomination for creating the role of Princess Puffer in the 1985 Broadway hit musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Along the way, Laine has benefited enormously from Dankworth’s musical guidance. Strongly influenced by Charlie Parker, but boasting a dry, airy tone, Dankworth consistently attracted top-flight musicians, surrounding Laine with jazz greats such as drummer Kenny Clarke and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. Together, they’ve represented the music with style and class.

“I’m happy doing what I’m doing when I’m doing it,” Laine said in a 1987 interview with writer Tom Ineck. “I suppose if somebody said to me, ‘You can only do one thing. You must cut out everything else,’ I think that I would naturally veer towards jazz-influenced music.”

While Laine’s stature among fans has always eclipsed her relatively lightweight reputation among jazz critics, the sheer range of her oeuvre sets her apart. Is there another artist whose résumé includes duet sessions with Ray Charles (1976’s Porgy and Bess) and Mel Tormé (1992’s Nothing Without You) as well as a Grammy-nominated recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Pierrot Lunaire?

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Trumpeter Doc Severinsen has enjoyed a similarly wide-ranging career.

Decades before Wynton Marsalis started racking up Grammys in jazz and classical categories, Severinsen was making a name for himself as a master of both idioms. While he gained notoriety leading the Tonight Show Orchestra from 1967 until Johnny Carson’s retirement in 1992, the gig was actually a poor showcase for his talent. A powerhouse trumpeter with a pure, warm tone, Severinsen first gained attention as a featured soloist in the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in the late 1940s. Like many of his peers, he was struck by the lightning bolt of bebop while serving in the Army.

“I dropped by the recreation room one day and I found a 78 record of somebody I’d never heard of called Dizzy Gillespie,” Severinsen told the Kansas City Jazz Society. “I think it was Groovin’ High and it absolutely turned me around. Then, when I was on Charlie Barnet’s band, I joined at the same time as Clark Terry. He was the first virtuoso trumpet player I ever sat beside. So, naturally I just couldn’t resist trying to play like him. So, at that time, I suppose the big influences were Dizzy, Miles Davis and Fats Navarro.

“But the main influence I had…was Benny Baker,” Severinsen continued. “He was Toscanini’s first trumpet player. Benny was legendary. And the sound that he got was just incredible. When Toscanini couldn’t get the fiddles to understand how he wanted something to sound, he’d have Benny play it for them.”

He put Baker’s training to good use as the big band era came to an end and he sought regular employment in the NBC Orchestra, a gig that eventually led him to “The Tonight Show.” With more than 30 albums as a leader to his credit, Severinsen has recorded in a wide array of styles, from big band swing, to jazz/rock fusion to light classical. He won a “Best Jazz Instrumental Performance—Big Band” Grammy in 1987 for his recording “Doc Severinsen and The Tonight Show Band—Volume I.” The band he brings to the Sunset Center tonight features some of the brilliant players from that session, including lead trumpet legend Snooky Young, still going strong at 88, drummer Ed Shaughnessy and saxophone giant Ernie Watts, who’s best known for his gorgeous, brooding work with Charlie Haden’s Quartet West.

DOC SEVERINSEN AND HIS BIG BAND performs Thursday, Feb. 22, at 8pm at the Sunset Center, San Carlos Street. between Eighth and Ninth, Carmel. $77. Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth perform Tuesday, 7:30 pm, $57. 620–2048, sunsetcenter.org