Following Jones departure, after thirteen years of an extraordinarily prolific collaboration materialized in fifteen albums and several world tours, Lewis fully assumed the leadership of the project and eventually recruited the renowned composer Bob Brookmeyer, whose compositional style determined a new  musical direction, more in sync with jazz’s evolution, for this ensemble, while other composers were contributing at the same time with new repertoire, thereby assuring the pertinency and the artistic vitality of this seminal project of New York’s jazz history. With Mel Lewis physical disappearance in 1990, the orchestra adopted the name Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and nominated Jim McNeely its resident composer, a role which this distinguished musician, composer and arranger still continues to fulfill to this day. Almost sixty years after its foundation, this unavoidable ensemble of the history of jazz, present for the first time in Guimarães Jazz in 1998, in a time when the festival was at the first stage of its trajectory of affirmation in Portugal’s musical landscape, continues to honor the legacy of its founders and challenging the conventions of orchestral jazz.

The line-up of musicians of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra is formed, as someone would expect, by highly competent and reputed musicians from the jazz scene of New York, among them Dick Oatts, its artistic director and by far the most ancient member of the orchestra, a statute that qualifies him as the most knowledgeable of its history and identity. Born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Richard Denis Oatts began his musical career in Minneapolis and moved to New York in 1977, the same year when he became a member of The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. Since then, Oatts has developed of body of work far beyond the frontiers of this ensemble, in groups such as Flim & The BB’s or in collaboration with great jazz musicians and institutions such as, among others, Lester Bowie, Ella Fitzgerald, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band or the Danish Radio Big Band, thereby establishing his reputation as a gifted multi-instrumentalist in the domain of woodwind instruments (saxophone, clarinet and flute). Besides his curriculum as sideman, the current artistic director of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra has a relevant discography as leader and is also a prestigious pedagogue – he was for some years a member of the Manhattan School of Music Faculty and is currently the coordinator of jazz studies at the Temple University of Philadelphia and, since 1998, “artist-in-residence” at the Amsterdam Conservatory.