Matt Mauser

Matt Mauser learned how to hold a room long before the rooms got big.\n\nGrowing up in Southern California, he made music with his father, received his first guitar at eight and wrote a song almost immediately. Music competed for years with another demanding discipline: swimming. Mauser became an All-American swimmer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo before eventually turning his competitive drive toward performance.\n\nIn 1997, he helped launch Tijuana Dogs. The band became his long-running laboratory for live entertainment — rock, pop, dance music, hip-hop, whatever the room demanded. The point was never simply to sing the set correctly. It was to read an audience, change direction in real time and make the people in front of him part of the show.\n\nThen another side of his voice emerged. Working with arranger and bandleader Pete Jacobs, Mauser developed a Sinatra-centered big-band show that rewarded almost the opposite instincts: restraint, phrasing, timing and the confidence to let a lyric breathe. Sinatra became a doorway rather than a boundary, with the repertoire widening across classic American popular music. In 2025, that side of his career reached Long Beach Arena with the Long Beach Symphony.\n\nAlongside the career was his life with Christina Mauser. They married in 2005, raised three children and both worked at Harbor Day School in Corona del Mar. Their lives also connected with Kobe Bryant’s educational and basketball projects: Matt created music for Bryant’s podcast The Punies, while Christina became an assistant coach in Bryant’s girls basketball program.\n\nOn January 26, 2020, Christina was killed in the helicopter crash that also took the lives of Kobe Bryant, Gianna Bryant and six others. For Matt and his children, a tragedy experienced around the world as breaking news was profoundly personal.\n\nWhat followed became part of Matt’s work without becoming the whole of it. He wrote “Lost,” established the Christina Mauser Foundation to support women and girls in sports, and later published the memoir Bittersweet Treasures: A Father’s Journey Through Loss & Healing.\n\nIn 2021, Mauser walked onto the America’s Got Talent stage and sang Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds.” The audition earned four yes votes, and he later returned as a Season 16 Wild Card performer. A national audience met him through grief, but the larger story was resilience, fatherhood and the decision to keep performing.\n\nAt Campus JAX, every part of that history eventually meets in one room. Mauser has been a resident artist since 2019, and few artists have worked the venue in more configurations: monthly Tijuana Dogs nights, Sinatra + More, JAX SongStage special editions centered on his original music, and the stripped-down JAX DUOS format.\n\nThat range is why “resident artist” means more here than frequency. Matt Mauser understands the assignment whether the room needs to dance, listen closely, hear the songs stripped to their bones, or meet him through his own writing. Either way, connect with the room.