Listening to the Phil Norman Tentet is like hearing the very essence of the best big band jazz – with all the thrills of that remarkable sound, but a lot less volume.

The Norman Tentet (actually eleven, since Norman doesn’t include himself in the number count) has been doing precisely that for more than fifteen years now. And doing it in a way that dips into the influential resources of such predecessors as the Birth of the Cool bands, while exploring new ideas via the contributions of gifted arrangers and composers Bob Florence, Dave Pell, Alan Broadbent, Roger Neumann and Kim Richmond, among others.

What did it take to create a prime, world-class jazz ensemble such as the Tentet? Phil Norman knows. “It all began,” he says, “when he was asked if he had a group to play a regular Wednesday night gig at an L.A. jazz club called Lunaria. I had no music,” he recalls, “no charts, no bandstands. No musicians. But now I had a string of Wednesday nights. And I soon learned that if you want to get something done, just commit to doing something you haven’t done before.”