SRJO: ONLY THE BEST OF THE BEST

SRJO is the Northwest's premier big band jazz ensemble. Founded in 1995, the 17-piece big band is made up of some of the most prominent jazz soloists and band leaders in the Pacific Northwest.

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For almost three decades, the SRJO was co-directed by drummer Clarence Acox, nationally recognized director of bands at Seattle's Garfield High School, and saxophonist/arranger Michael Brockman, a long-time faculty member at the University of Washington School of Music. Michael has recently taken over as Artistic Director as Clarence turns his attention to his many other projects. He still serves as Artistic Director Emeritus.

 

NOTE-BY-NOTE: MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER JAZZ BAND

SRJO is in the "business" of preserving jazz. We work to recover lost-to-print jazz, making available to orchestras the ability to bring these compositions to jazz lovers around the world. We may not have a historic building, but we have been building a historic orchestra, by recovering jazz classics for performance by the ensemble is accomplished by co-director Michael Brockman, our region's outstanding practitioner of the art of transcribing lost-to-print composition and arrangement, note for note, from vintage recordings.

 

The SRJO's extensive and growing repertoire is drawn from the 100-year history of jazz, from turn-of-the-20th-century ragtime to turn-of-the-21st-century avant-garde. This included works by America's most famous jazz composers, among them Fletcher Henderson, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Thad Jones, and of course, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. In addition, the SRJO's repertoire grows each year as the ensemble adds previously unpublished works to the SRJO library. 

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