After my first big band arranging experience in 2014, when I arranged a full concert’s worth of my fusion originals plus some Pink Floyd and The Police material, I thought I was done arranging. While the concert in October of 2014 was a great success and I really enjoyed my two days of fame as frontman, composer and arranger of almost all of the music, after I came back to Indiana it was an anti-climax.

My friend Lothar, who had talked me into doing the arrangements in the first place, started bugging me again a few months after I was back home in Indiana. Somehow I didn’t feel it and I didn’t hear from my friend in a long while. Then, in January this year (2017) Brent Wallarab emailed about my arrangements. Brent is one top notch writer and arranger who (unlike me) knows how to do this stuff. He was interested in some interesting big band music for his Indiana University Jazz Ensemble – and they would even pay for the charts. He ended up picking two, “Bajao do Banana”, which had been played at the Tuebingen Jazz & Klassik Tage 2014, and “Alice’s Cool B***s” which is a piece that was originally recorded on “The Rise of Kwyjibo” and then got a big band treatment to become the grand finale of the show. But it never got performed because we ran out of time.

After Brent expressed his interest in my amateurish big band efforts, a new enthusiasm awakened and I thought I’d expand another of the tunes from “Peter’s Money”. “Diane’s Doo-Doo” was the pick.