Back over a decade ago, when I had the opportunity to form this group, I was inundated with different concepts from a wide variety of sources. Perhaps the most unique was to put together a group like this one seen to the right. Fortunately, I didn’t listen to those suggestions and went ahead to put together a 17 piece big band. We started having rehearsals once a week at the Musicians Union Local 802 on 48th Street on Wednesday nights. We started out with a small library of musical charts that I was able to obtain through the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies thanks to the help of patient and author Dan Morgenstern (see his excellent book, Living with Jazz Over the years, the number of charts have increased well over 1500!