When the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra played its last concert in front of an audience in late February 2020, its members thought they had a bright and busy future ahead of them. "We left with the expectation of going out for another long tour and to have all this new music and new shows and stuff that we're doing — and everything got cut off," said orchestra saxophonist Sherman Irby of Warren. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic scuttled those plans, resulting in what Irby described as the first time that probably all of the orchestra have "spent not playing with other people for almost a year. It’s a definite change in what we have been dealing with, for those of us my age, for the last 40 years, basically playing in front of people and playing with others.”