So in Sample land, there have been a handful of "okay" bigband/jazz libraries to date. Part of the reason there have not been a lot of great sample libraries out there dealing with this area, are 2 reasons: 1) Jazz sampling is HIGHLY expressive, take a lot of time and money to sample, and is nearly impossible to program without spending hours working on it. 2) Its a very, very small market. ProjectSam (no relation to me) is a Dutch company that has a lot of great, quick composing tools that really sound amazing, starting with one of the first really good brass libraries in Giga-studio days to Symphobia and a lot of great orchestral colors. Well now they really did something great - Swing, their bigband/jazz library. Check it out here. https://www.projectsam.com/Products/Swing/1449 -Sam
Composing : Plugin Friday - Project Sam's Swing library. by Samuel Estes
Plugin Friday - Project Sam's Swing library.
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First of all - there is nothing like getting your big band charts played live. As you said, the best way to hear a great improvisation or even structured performance with all the nuances and articulations is the real deal/the real McCoy --- but of course that can be said pretty much of any genre we do electronic sampling for. Whether it be an original piece or an arrangement of someone else's material - getting charts played live is for me as big a 'high' as hearing my electronic scores in theater. I have had one such example here for some years as a good example of this - check out the arrangement I did for the famous Cozie Cole hit of 1958 - Topsy. Now its one thing to use electronic big band samples to hear an 'approximation' - but I'm no expert drummer and I can not come close with samples to approximate a talented dummer doing an improvised solo. https://www.stage32.com/media/644309202969309144 With that said (sound like a most interesting man commercial :) - when I need to use jazz and big band samples, for the last few years, I have been using Garritan Jazz & Big Band.