At a glance

About 45 years ago, the wife of musician Wes Orr started jotting down the name of every singer, instrumentalist and ensemble he accompanied.

She stopped writing when he reached 1,000.

Orr, 74, racked up most of the numbers with the Columbus Jazz Orchestra, with which he has played trumpet since its inception in 1973.

The orchestra will mark its 45th year with a series of concerts Thursday through Sunday at the Southern Theatre. The guest performers will include saxophonist Joshua Redman, bassist and composer John Clayton and pianist Micah Thomas.

In the early 1970s, jazz orchestras had lost their grip as rock 'n' roll ratcheted Columbus Jazz Orchestra 45th Anniversary Extravaganza Southern Theatre, 21 E. Main St. 1-800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday $18 to $71

into the national spotlight. But enough local players remained that five bands of 15 or 16 musicians each performed in a yearly showcase during the Ohio State Fair.

Between sets of a show in 1973, Orr stood with bass player Al Berry griping about the state of the industry.

“I said, ‘You know, Al, wouldn’t it be great if we took the best players out of each of these bands and formed our own group?’”

Trumpet player Ray Eubanks overheard the conversation and jumped on the idea. An instructor in the Jazz Studies program at Capital University, Eubanks suggested that their fledgling band rehearse in the college’s music building on Sunday nights.

One Sunday evening, Capital president Thomas Langevin and his wife were strolling through campus and heard a brassy sound coming from the music facility.

The next morning, Eubanks received a call from Langevin, who gushed about the practice session and gave the band a first donation of $1,500 (which would be worth $8,500 today, according to the online inflation calculator Dollar Times). The gift led to the formal creation of the orchestra known then as the Jazz Arts Group.

“Thomas Langevin is why it became the Jazz Arts Group,” said Eubanks, 76.

The only caveat involved adding a few students to the 18-piece band to keep it under Capital’s official auspices.

After a series of casual free concerts, the orchestra drew famed trumpeter Clark Terry to perform at its first ticketed public concert in November 1974.

“At the end of the day, I had more money than I started with,” Eubanks said.

Thanks to a grant from Capital, Jazz Arts Group musicians earned unionscale pay — $25 per show (worth $142 in 2017 dollars).

Paying musicians well remains a Columbus Jazz Orchestra pillar. Eubanks

said that other ensembles have been forced to cut their pay, but not the CJO.

“The Jazz Arts Group still pays good money.”

By 1978, the ensemble grew large enough to split from Capital and move into the auditorium at Battelle Memorial Institute on King Avenue.

Twenty years later, they switched to the exquisite and recently renovated Southern Theatre.

In between, the Jazz Arts Group hosted Rosemary Clooney, Anita Day, and dozens of other jazz greats. A name change in 1996 established the Columbus Jazz Orchestra as the performance outlet and the Jazz Arts Group as its parent group.

The orchestra quickly gained a nationwide reputation.

While at a jazz

educators conference in New York City in the mid-1980s, Eubanks fielded booking requests from multiple artists who wanted to play in Columbus.

“All of a sudden, it hit me that we’d actually done something,” he said. “That Columbus, Ohio, had done something outstanding. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra is a copy of us. The Smithsonian Jazz Orchestra, that’s a copy of us.”

By the early 2000s, Eubanks knew he needed to let off the pedal of the Jazz Arts Group before he burned out.

“I was running the business and running the music, and I finally ran out of gas,” he said.

In 2002, exuberant New York City trumpeter Byron Stripling — a previous guest artist with the CJO — took his place as artistic director.

Stripling’s less-thanglowing perceptions

of the “cowtown” he thought he was in for faded away during his first visit.

“I walk onstage for my first performance and … the house was packed,” Stripling, 56, said. “These guys were going crazy, and the quality of the musicianship was great. It wasn’t a struggle here. I realized the people in central Ohio had a love for jazz, so the emptiness inside me was instantly filled.”

The CJO’s other Byron — saxophonist Byron Rooker — is, along with Orr, one of two remaining original members.

Rooker has performed with most of his heroes — Al Cohn and Zoot Simms, Frank West and Frank Foster, Ernie Wilkins and Benny Carter — without leaving his hometown.

“I’ve played with some of the all-time jazz greats, and I didn’t have to go to New York or Los Angeles. They came here,” Rooker, 70, said. “There aren’t many people who have had that kind of experience, and I’m truly grateful for it.”

On his walls at home, Orr hung pictures of many of the famous figures who stopped by the CJO stage — a tiny fraction of the names on his wife's list.

But the lifelong musician cares more about the thousands of audience members he's played to than the hundreds of legends he's played with.

"I hope we've made a few people smile over the years," he said. "You think about what you do as a musician and you look at what’s going on in the world today and it’s so frickin' scary. So hopefully they can come into the Southern Theatre for a few hours and forget that garbage."