Dean Pratt Big Band

This 16-piece band features the best musicians New York has to offer. Many are former sidemen of the Harry James, Maynard Ferguson, Woody Herman, Gerry Mulligan and Buddy Rich bands, and are currently featured on Broadway and in the New York studios. The band plays music from the libraries of Harry James, Count Basie, Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman, but also many pieces of original music written and arranged for the DPBB. No other big band today captures so authentically the spirit and drive that made the best bands of the Swing Era so compelling, and no band possesses such a remarkably deep and diverse book, comprising charts by such classic Big Band arrangers as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Mundy, Neal Hefti and Ernie Wilkins to more progressive arrangers such as Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Holman, Thad Jones, Francy Boland, Don Piestrup and Mike Abene music to dance to, as well as music to listen to, no matter what the occasion.

In addition to being the recipient of a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts, the band was also the first jazz group to be invited to participate in the summer concert series at the Washington Square Park Musical Festival, where they presented, for several years, the history-in-music of many jazz composers and arrangers. Dean Pratt has toured with Woody Herman, performed and recorded with the jazz/rock group Ten Wheel Drive, and helped organize, as well as perform and record with Bill Watrous's Band, Manhattan Wildlife Refuge. He has toured internationally for several years with Buddy Rich, with whom he appeared on numerous television shows, and with Gil Evans, Sammy Davis Jr, and Tony Bennett.