This concluding evening the Wayne Horvitz retrospective features Horvitz's New York Composers Orchestra West and the President. The New York Composers Orchestra was formed in 1986 by composers Wayne Horvitz and Robin Holcomb as a means to perform works by composers wishing to write for jazz instrumentation without being confined by traditional jazz and big band styles. In New York, the orchestra was commissioned to perform works by Anthony Braxton, Lenny Picket, Butch Morris, Marty Ehrlich, and Elliott Sharp, among many others. After Horvitz and Holcomb relocated to Seattle in 1988, however, the NYCO repertoire spread out across the US — it has been performed by the original ensemble in New York City, Horvitz and Holcomb's New York Composers Orchestra West, which very occasionally performed here in Seattle, and the Boston-based Jazz Composers Alliance, which has also showcased some of its scores.

Opportunities to hear large orchestras as adventurous as this, featuring musicians as gifted as this, are few and far between. As Rolling Stone has noted: "The NYCO points directions out of the musical prison that surround too much current jazz. And, like all truly great big bands, it swings its tail off."

In this Seattle revival, Horvitz presents a stellar lineup of old friends from New York days along with some of the outstanding Seattleites whom he recruited to his cause early in his time here: on reeds, Hans Teuber, Briggan Krauss, Skerik, Doug Wieselman, and Jim Dejoie; on trumpets, Ron Miles, Brad Allison, and Thomas Marriott; on trombones, Chris Stover and Nelson Bell; on French horn, Tom Varner; on bass, Bobby Previte; on piano and organ, Wayne Horvitz. Robin Holcomb conducts and plays piano. With special guest, on guitar: Tim Young.

Also performing is Horvitz's update of his great early ensemble, The President (just in time for the election). Formed in 1985 with an original line-up of Bobby Previte, Kevin Cosgrove, Joe Gallant, Dave Sewelson, and Wayne Horvitz, the President performed frequently on New York's downtown rock scene, and soon settled on a line-up which also featured Elliott Sharp, Bill Frisell, Dave Hofstra, and Doug Wieselman.

Horvitz conceived of the President as he began working with sequencers for the first time, enjoying the results as he placed his harmonic and melodic ideas against repetitive grooves. The ensemble work was hardly immobile, however: the band reformulated the combinations in real time around the directions and sounds of the soloists. In this sense, according to Horvitz, the soloist informed and shaded the composition, rather than purely the other way around. Or as the London Times wrote, "Sonny Boy Williamson in a Zen Temple."

For this revival, Horvitz's long-time New York colleagues, tenor saxophonist Doug Wieselman and drummer Bobby Previte return, and appear along with three of Horvitz's longtime Seattle-based collaborators, the powerhouse guitarist Tim Young, electric bassist Keith Lowe, and dual-threat keyboardist/trombonist Steve Moore.

Opening the show: the outstanding composer and arranger Sam Gray leads a driving big band of his contemporary, younger Seattleites. Gray, a 2008 graduate of Garfield High School's extraordinary jazz program, has also been a student of Wayne Horvitz's for many years. Of Gray, who now is studying composition at Temple University in Philadelphia, Horvitz says: "Sam was one of a few students first at Washington Middle School and then with the Garfield band who studied improvisation with me — he's a sax player — who also were interested in composition. By ninth and tenth grade he was bringing me really interesting charts, and by eleventh grade they were really great, really interesting. For example, he did an arrangement of 'Caledonian Mission,' off The Band's Music from Big Pink, and also a They Might Be Giants tune. Plus a lot of originals. He was already pulling this off in eleventh and twelfth grade. When he gets out he's going to be a force of nature."