The WDR BIG BAND looks back at 1947 as the year of its birth. Alongside the famous big band standards of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey they play the compositions and arrangements of the most varied big band leaders. Since 1994 the internationally appreciated jazz musician Bill Dobbins has been musical director of the WDR BIG BAND. He carries on the work of Jerry van Rooyen, regularly inviting European and American jazz figures to work on projects with the WDR BIG BAND - for example Carmen McRae, Phil Woods, Eddie Daniels, Jean Toots Thielemanns, Charlie Mariano or Roger Kellaway. Bill Dobbins will also continue the collaboration of the WDR BIG BAND with important big band arrangers like Bill Holman, John Clayton, Bob Brookmeyer, George Gruntz or Vince Mendoza. With its productions and concerts, the WDR BIG BAND covers a wide stylistic spectrum: the repertoire of the band ranges from traditional and modern big band jazz all the way to fusion, soul, funk and new kinds of orchestral concept. Prominent bandleaders praise their sound and quality as a premiering band. A wealth of studio and concert projects testify to the musical potential of the WDR BIG BAND with its international line-up. A highlight in the concert activities of the band last summer was the European tour with Phil Collins. Along with his own band musicians, ten horns of the WDR BIG BAND formed the Phil Collins Big Band, which on 11th July 1996 at the Royal Albert Hall in London kicked off its1996 tour with a concert for a Royal audience in honour of the South African president Nelson Mandela. Quincy Jones conducted the band, as he also did at the two sold-out concerts at this year's Montreux Jazz Festival, marking the high point of a tour with concerts and jazz festivals in Monte Carlo, Perugia, Antibes, Montreux, Victoria and Valencia. Another great event was "Flame - Olympia in Concert", where the WDR BIG BAND played on 27th July 1996 on the Museum Square in Bonn. Along with YellowJacket, Chaka Khan, Brenda Russel and Lori Perry, and conducted by Vince Mendoza, they played numbers from the Olympic CD Flame, produced by WDR that year in cooperation with Sportmarketing GmbH for "Das Erste" (ARD) as the official music for the German Olympic team. The Bonn open-air concert also formed the forum for the presentation of the jazz award of the German Phonographic Associaton for the CD Jazzpan„ to the arranger and guest conductor, the WDR BIG BAND and their producer Wolfgang Hirschmann.
On 14th September 1996, for the anniversary of the Cologne Philharmonic, the WDR BIG BAND and the soloists Markus and Simon Stockhausen performed their composition Jubilee at a live event with fireworks and a laser show to an audience of 70,000-100,000 in the Rheingarten. In he meantime the WDR BIG BAND has recorded the commissioned work Jubilee with Markus and Simon Stockhausen as well as other musical guests on CD.