National Youth Jazz Orchestra

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The National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO) is a British jazz orchestra founded in 1963 by its current chairman, Bill Ashton.

Based in Harrow, Middlesex, the NYJO started life as the London Schools' Jazz Orchestra. Its aims are to provide an opportunity for gifted young musicians from around the UK to perform big band jazz in major concert halls, theatres, and on radio and television, and to make recordings, commission new works from British composers and arrangers, and to introduce a love a jazz to as wide an audience as possible, but especially to schoolchildren. It is also the only full-time big band operating in the UK.

The NYJO's members have included most of the major British jazz talent over the last three decades, including Guy Barker, Richard James Burgess, Nigel Hitchcock, Dave O'Higgins, Simon Gardner, Andy Cleyndert, Julian Argüelles, Jamie Talbot, Simon Phillips, and Gerard Presencer.