understand the term pop courtship blues this album which is more than a simple city but it music class you can learn about the history of jazz the importance of the blues and the development of the blues within the jazz idiom by cities one is a d v d with a wonderful concert and the other is a music album i could always on talk to training i wrote to him and he called back to the station number and also to my home and now we have the proof and he  man i love jazz it's an american art form that's my main focus he got eighteen pieces it's pretty tough to book that to play live i breath think that the more people that get exposed to this music and see it live and in person and see seventy people making music together see that power that right in front of them it's really hard for anybody to to refute turn around and i think through everything starting with the composer he's he's really kind of a amazingly talented guy i mean i've tried writing my whole life and not easy it's just not music is a gift i've been gift and i'm proud that i have the gift and i tranny's music is just so well written they practically play themselves it was just a real fun time to come here and play with these guys it really wasn't sure what it was going to sound like until just now listening to  i grew up in new jersey been playing saxophone since i was in fourth grade so i bought some is about twenty years now but for about the past seventy years as a full time musician in new york area just started teaching in public school this year so i have to take that what's you know what what what kind of group makes that makes music like that you know and it's it's a real thrill to play or to play lead in a band like this starting off in the fourth grade then and then i perceive that in junior high this all out i was twelve and i was playing baseball with a friend who turned out to be a great trumpet player and his father was a jazz wow people can actually do that because there was a long time but every time i saw it that guy he would he would put on a record listen to the sound listen to it so that's the way it started and never looked back i can remember when i was the new like for example on the eleventh grade between eleventh and twelfth my father worked at night so he was sleeping a day so i went to a friend of mine's house when nobody was home nobody told me to do it by just as compelled so i started to to write with the idea of getting into commercial arrangement which was the furthest thing from my mind as a jazz player i put a demo and i started going around and agencies and jingle mouses duction companies next thing i knew i was a commercial ranger and i did all kinds of crazy things and the next thing i know i was in a trombone player anymore i was known as a writer session and telling jokes or just talking about daily activities or experiences with their family or joking around i think the best thing about big band is always the camaraderie that you get when you put seventeen guys in one room but i really got away from big band music for many years and they say you always go back to what where you came from and i really enjoy it a lot this what you want to play when you're a kid you know somebody said to you i want you to play in the in this kind of band and you go man that's great my favorite thing about today is the camaraderie of all the musicians how many years i've known for example sells because in other musicians in the group or what a small world it is even though i may have met somebody here for the first time we have a mutual friend who says hello to them and it's it's incredible this was very special we're talking about jerry i've known him since  and we kind of grew up together musically parted and every once in a while i mean ten years or so we've learned and today was one of those days so i got a chance to see a friend we're trying to push the art of big band writing and big band performance because i think as long as there's musicians who want to do it as much as there might not be the financial feasibility so it there's definitely going to be that art form around having a big band like this is so expensive and everybody's got their own lives to do unless you get kids right out of college who are fresh and full of piss and vinegar it's going to be hard to keep a band like this together that's why it's nice to do this with mike have somebody who his house lindsay is an ophthalmologist they had this group called the doctors so i went over and i played and i met roy and i met a couple of the other people that kind of wandered into the session and that really kind of became my my friendship with roy mike came by to play with this little group and and then he asked me to come in a couple of times and play with with the big band it was sort of like an audition if you will and i guess this is the third cd project th we don't even talk necessarily about who you know what it is we're going to do with it it's just it's being in the studio and this is an environment where you can where you can make music all it's really just to give back something to to the arts because there's just not a lot of live music anymore and it's a lot of great musicians in the new york area so it kind of gives them a little bit of an opportunity to police record something you know i really really enjoyed the quality of the band that that that mike was together so it's always a very very interesting blend of some of the younger players and older more established players that and mike is just such a fantastic writer  i kind of push the boundaries a little bit i mean you notice we have bass clarinet some flutes and clarinets it's not uncommon but it's not you know a lot of groups don't use them and i try to i try to bring other indians and styles and things like even though some of the pieces were almost thirty years old he said there's definitely a freshness a contemporary feel to them that i think still makes music really really viable today as is a collection of music some of it is actually quite old the one thing that we did tender moments was actually written in one thousand and sixty eight for a little group that i had in boston when i came to new york and i formed this group called jazz horizons orchestra which was a  thirteen piece group i wrote an arrangement of this tender moment so that is that's a very old riser that's thirty years old some of the other things are newer and actually two of the sayings were written specifically for this session the mike style of writing is so unique that it's it's different in the sense that he can write very varied types of formats and and very different types of harmonies and things you don't always hear it when you're when you're playing it but when you hear a back he is just really struck by like how how creatively it's all put together and the little colors of texture and harmony that that he's he's got his music it's just just wonderful his approach to the big band is to feature soloists so it's really more of a large group supporting a soloist in a small group type of an approach rather than a traditional big band which has sections playing off against each other  notices a lot of opportunity for these guys to stretch out i tend to be fairly unstructured and fairly loose in my writing i try to give a lot of room for improvisation because i really want the players to take what i've done and then kind of do their own thing with it the thing i like best about it was with this particular group of people you can bring them an idea and they will take it and it will become there's and they will change it and you know wonderful things i think that just as certain personality types are improvisers you know i think there's certain people that like playing and play classical music that their personality fits reading music and interpret but i think that people that play jazz the element that brings you with that because you never know exactly what you're going to do the amount of concentration listening and and again skill that everybody's to have on each of their instrument is so incredible and i'm just glad to be part of it i mean most of the guys here have all you know ten fifteen twenty years experience on me and i learned so much just sitting down and getting next and i came away with it so much from today you know especially being around guys like this you have to be on your game so you really have to concentrate and help speed around people of this ilk you know i mean these guys really know what to do you coming into the studio reading the charts you have sixteen pieces  you make one little mistake and everyone's in the room it leads to the other things and you've messed up the whole band focus is so important and i say for that is experience area why do why d take you better make sure that it sounds good but there was they might decide to keep it safe but you going to sound it out once they say record there's something that clicks in your mind and you just go on another level total focus every every part of your brain gets focused on that chart until the the piece is recorded and then minutes through diligence and lots of practice everybody here would attest that they've honed their craft over years and years of solitary practice and really just getting a total command of their instrument and reading music honestly in this kind of situation it's totally dependent on and play with this group this is not something that just happens everything i use today is is something that i picked up along the way and for forty five years i read every no is listening to johnny hodges or duke ellington or you know ornette coleman it's all everything it's a composite of everything i've heard in my life you know you put on you put on a table achieve the goals immediately it eventually come around i wonder how i got the virus of play music i just want to hit me that that sits the only thing they have wanted to do and it's still the only thing i want to do it's hard it's hard to get that first step you know and somehow forty years ago one thing led to another doing a day job i went to vegas i worked in a seven eleven could get a job could could get a could get playing to all my friends were doing great playing drums left came back to new york you know wind up in boston it was you know i just kept on trying and somewhere along the line somebody says hey you know come with me you it really takes that takes some  i usually say that you should only get into this business if you can help it but you don't have a choice you can't do anything else you're compelled to do it if you think me and i have to do this but i'd like to also do that agree it doesn't matter how talented they are you know you could be a mozart i wouldn't tell you to be a professional musician for me this was quite a thrill because i get to play with one of my heroes jerry bergonzi he's one of my childhood heroes and actually that's not true he's probably about the same age as i am but he's great settled there he's always been one of my favorites and it was a great opportunity to play on gifted like them where we can invade like a trainer for miles and not many of us reach the top four profession we can play you know with what's really great people jerry is really great people without a doubt he's the world's greatest player is just that he's not very well known by the general communities pretty much a musician's musician talk about focus every note he plays is playing that perfect and you know he's just amazing he's the pinnacle of chance of a jazz musician and it's you can't you don't work that mean that's as good as it's going to be it would be like doing something with miles or with wayne shorter or john coltrane that it's a totally spiritual i don't do this there's no compromise i don't compromise playing music i just play it was all good it was all good today sometimes as a player you know for myself i'm talking about i sometimes you walk out you go i don't care if i ever hear that piece again you know and i don't have that today i can listen to every one of them for an so am i particularly proud of any one piece of i'm happy that i was able to write them all and i'm happy that i was here i'm happy that i met roy and th i think god gives his gifts and word to use that this is what i can do it's what i can do i can teach and i can write i can't do a lot more i'm not good hour i'm not walking around with tons of money and i'm not a powerful speaker but i you know i can communicate through my music and i think i think the music that i music classical music gone doctor and a jazz band leader and i would like to read this for you yes musicians out the entrepreneur also the musical world instantly creating conflict works out of the barest of essential and also  thank you very much for having