He can speak in haltering Mandarin, having studied the language back in the 1980s at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) for an exchange program in Taiwan that never materialized.

In 2007, Aitken was inducted to the Jazz Educators Hall of Fame alongside such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

He recently retired as director of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music at the National University of Singapore and often holds concerts in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou.

Now on his eighth official trip to China this year, he has been helping get jazz bands up and running at local schools in second-tier cities like Wuxi in Jiangsu province.

"The level of jazz musicians here in China is now equal to or better than the US or England," he says, citing jazz guitarist Lawrence Hu and saxophone player Zhang Xiaolu among the top local talents. Zhang runs the Jazz Studies Program at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Aitken has launched, or is launching, new jazz festivals in Thailand and China. But Shanghai has a special place in his heart because of its creativity, architecture and rich jazz history.

"You see things here that you just don't see in other cities in Europe or the US," he says. "One of the professors recently organized a summer saxophone camp here and it drew 120 students. You never hear of that anywhere else."

The dance halls, jazz clubs and big bands added to the color and glamour of Shanghai in the 1930s, before the government banned jazz as a symbol of decadent American culture.

It also went underground in the US for decades after being branded a threat to the morals of American youth. The Beatles helped trigger a renaissance of interest in the 1960s with their jazz-infused pop songs, and jazz came back in vogue with a vengeance from around the 1990s.