Skip Martin certainly has connections to the Mahoning Valley.

Before he joined the Dazz Band in the early 1980s, he played for a couple of years in the Youngstown-based funk band Mighty Generation. And he spent nearly 20 years as a member of Kool & the Gang, the band started by Youngstown natives Robert and Ronald Bell.

But he is not from Youngstown.

“I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘I went to East High School with you,'” Martin said during a telephone interview from Las Vegas, which has been his home when he’s not on the road for the last 34 years.

That’s what happens when you win a Grammy and sing and play trumpet with two successful bands. Everyone wants to claim you as their own.

Martin will be back in the town that adopted him when the Dazz Band performs Saturday at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre as part of the Youngstown Mega Music Festival.

Martin grew up in Sacramento, Calif., and began playing professionally when he was 15, but he started on his musical path before that.

He vividly remembers being in the car with his grandparents at age 7 in 1965 when the DJ on the radio said Nat King Cole had died and then played “Unforgettable.”

“It sounded like he was in the car with us,” Martin said. “I said to Nana, ‘That’s what I’m going to do. … I’m gonna play music so when I die, people will feel I’m still in the car with them.”

He connected with Mighty Generation when the band was playing a show in San Jose, Calif. He was looking for a band and they were looking for a trumpet player, so he left the West Coast for the Mahoning Valley in the late ’70s at a time when the area’s economy was crumbling with the collapse of the steel industry.

“One of the things I tell people when I’m doing seminars — I’m also a motivational speaker — is you have to have courage to leave home, leave your familiar environment and go to places less familiar, less convenient, less comfortable,” he said.

There were some adjustments — his bandmates made fun of the electric blanket he used to endure the northeast Ohio winters, and it took a while to realize that folks used a certain 12-letter word implying an unnaturally close relationship with one’s mother as a term of endearment here — but he had a good time.

Ultimately, though, Martin was looking for a band that had more ambition than “wearing hot pants and smoking weed.”

One of the bands Mighty Generation played with was Cleveland’s Kinsman Dazz Band, led by Bobby Harris, and Harris brought Martin into the band’s lineup around the time the group dropped Kinsman from its name and signed to Motown Records.

The first two Motown albums, “Invitation to Love” and “Let the Music Play,” produced some singles that didn’t quite crack the top 40 on the R&B charts, but that changed with 1982’s “Keep It Live.”

The single “Let It Whip” not only topped the R&B chart, it became a Top 5 hit on the pop chart and won a Grammy Award for best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocals.

That song continues to be embraced by new generations of listeners. It’s been used in such films as “Next Friday,” “Pitch Perfect” and “The First Purge” and can be heard in the video game “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.” It also was sampled by Justin Timberlake for a remix of his hit “Cry Me a River.”

Martin said it wasn’t a song the band members envisioned becoming a huge hit.

“It wasn’t my choice (for the first single),” he said. “It wasn’t most of our choice. But it had something so unique to it, it just started catching on. We didn’t per se pick that song to be the one, but it’s how the cards fell. And we kept grinding. Then came ‘Joystick’ and ‘Let It All Blow’ … It just started to blossom and take on a life of its own.”

Martin believes the band’s talent as a live act and its look made it stand out at the time

“Bands didn’t want to come behind us when we played,” he said. “We dressed like a singing group, but it was a band, everyone played instruments. It was like The Temptations and Tower of Power mixed. There were not too many bands like us.”

After a few years, Martin wasn’t happy with the Dazz Band’s musical direction, and Kool & the Gang (a group the Dazz Band had toured with) offered Martin a chance to take over as lead singer after James “J.T.” Taylor left to pursue a solo career.

The only downside of being the principal lead singer is that he didn’t get to play the trumpet much.

“I really wanted to be in the band because I loved the horn parts,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to do, and my trumpet was sitting on a stand.”

Eventually the band brought in a second lead singer, which freed up Martin to play trumpet and still sing.

When Kool & the Gang tried to reunite with Taylor in the mid-’90s, Martin went back to the Dazz Band. When that reunion fell apart a few years later, Martin did gigs with both acts for several years.

These days Martin does about 25 to 40 shows a year with the Dazz Band in addition to doing corporate gigs where the setlist spans both bands as well as his solo material. He also wrote a children’s book, “Morgan the Clydesdale Pony.”

He has an album finished that he recorded in Youngstown with Clarence Ross, his Mighty Generation bandmate and music director for the Isley Brothers. The song “Nobody” is available now on streaming services, and he plans to release the full album by the end of the year.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Martin also recorded a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” for which he recruited a star-studded list of contributors, including Stevie Wonder, Taylor Dayne, Ray Parker Jr., Robert “Kool” Bell, Doug E. Fresh, Neal McCoy and more than 20 others. Proceeds benefit St. Jude Research Hospital.

“That was my most profound project,” Martin said. “It wasn’t about me; it was about us.”