I first met Ed playing sax in a north London bar in 1985, and bought him a drink. It was the start of an amazing friendship. I quickly became a fan of Ed's steaming (and criminally under-recorded) hard bop outfit, and took the opportunity to drag him into various studios as I worked on several demos. Not surprisingly he is the one musician that has been an ever present on all of my projects. He played on the NW1 single "The Band Played The Boogie" (Ninja Tune 1991) that brought me to the attention of Blue Note, has played on all Us3 albums since then, and has been a member of the live Us3 band since the very first gig in 1993. As we toured the globe with Us3, we must have spent thousands of hours playing each other different CDs & talking about music. One day the conversation came around to big bands and we discovered we had a mutual passion for the more maverick big band arrangers like Gil Evans and Don Ellis. At the time we couldn't understand why nobody was making any attempt to drag the big band format kicking & screaming up to date, so we decided we would do it.

In March 1999 we recorded "Genetically Modified" and immediately hit the main problem – economics! We quickly found out that we simply could not afford to fund this ourselves. Having 9 people squashed into my little studio was straining the air-conditioning too… Labels we approached at the time thought we were completely mad. Eventually a CDR found its way to John Cumming of promoters Serious (www.serious.org.uk) and we were offered a gig at London's Spitz club in October 2000. After a frantic period of writing (and a little rehearsing) we hit the stage, 9 horns, a keyboard player, and me with my Mac & samplers. Despite the fact it was Friday 13th the gig went (reasonably) well. John L Walters review in the Guardian said "If you experiment, you expect to win, fail and make some discoveries, and all that happened". Bearing in mind we only had 5 songs written and the rest of the gig was completely improvised (I just threw beats & basslines at them) it was an accurate review. The crowd reaction was great, which gave us a big lift, and spurred us on to try and complete the album.

Soon after that Ed called me and said "I've got a great funky bassline that works in 3 sections, the A section is in 4/3/4/3/4/3/5, the B section is 5/5/5/6, and the C section is 6/6/6/5. It's a Don Ellis thang! Can you program some hip-hop drum patterns to fit?". Thanks Ed. After a prolonged period of head scratching we went a little further and in March 2001 recorded "King Don", along with "Las Vegas Tango" & "Bounce". The album mixes of "Las Vegas Tango" & "Bounce" are from these sessions. Even at this time we were still getting strange looks from labels we approached, and when I eventually bought a Pro-Tools system and moved into a bigger production studio in London's east end we decided it was now or never. The bulk of the album was recorded and mixed here, in April and June 2003.

Having the up-to-date technology of Pro-Tools the album was recorded with a core horn section of Ed (saxes & flutes), Chris Storr (trumpets) and Adrian Fry (trombones). Neville Malcolm provided some weight on the bass, and Jessica Lauren & Jim Watson played a variety of keyboards. It was always our intention to try and modernise the big band sound, and we applied a variety of studio effects & trickery in the final mixes (eg check out the filtering on "Quasimodo", the programmed section in the predominantly live "Mozaic", etc). A special shout should go out to Pro-Tools maestro JC Concato. We also wanted to pay homage to some of our favourite big band leaders hence the cover version of Gil Evans' "Las Vegas Tango", the Don Ellis-like shifting time signatures of "King Don", and the cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (Quincy Jones' biggest selling arrangement ever!). I also think it's possible to hear other influences, eg the late 60s Miles Davis meets 21st century hip-hop vibe of "Quasimodo", through to the Dave Holland-like feel of "Cape Town".

Looking back I'm really proud of the album, making this was a massive learning curve for us all. The next challenge is to perform it live, which we hope to do in 2004.