So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary.

The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945. "The Compleat Conductor" Oxford University Press 1998. Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty.

Gunther Schuller (born November 22 1925) is an American composer conductor horn player author historian and jazz musician.