About the BBCG
The Big Band Charts Group brings musicians together to locate, preserve, understand, and perform big-band music. This page introduces the group, explains what makes the BBCG distinctive, and points visitors toward membership and participation.
On This Page
Who We Are
The BBCG is a community of bandleaders, musicians, arrangers, librarians, educators, collectors, and other people who care about big-band music. Members share practical knowledge and help one another solve the everyday problems involved in finding, preparing, and performing charts.
What We Do
BBCG members exchange experience and information about:
- Locating published, used, and out-of-print music.
- Identifying charts, editions, arrangers, and missing parts.
- Preparing readable music and managing band libraries.
- Using notation, scanning, audio, and other tools responsibly.
A Cooperative Community
The group works because members contribute what they know, ask clear questions, respect copyrights and creators, and treat one another courteously. The BBCG is not a music-trading service; it is a place for legitimate research, practical help, and shared expertise.
Our History
The BBCG has grown through many years of member participation and accumulated knowledge.
The actual founding members have been lost to history, but it started out (we think) in the late 1990s or early 2000s as a Yahoo Groups forum. In 2017 or 2018, we began hearing that Yahoo was going to be shutting down their groups chat forums, so in 2018, as near as we can remember, after much research and discussion, we downloaded the member list from Yahoo Groups and started the group in its new home on the Groups.io platform.
In about 2009, we had discovered that a number of less-than-ethical people had joined our group, and were simply collecting the charts members shared and selling them on their own private websites, including some arrangements by our own group members.
In addition to this, while we had only "handshake agreement" guidelines in place about respecting music still in print, and several publishers who are members of the group let us know that the members who disregarded our guidelines were putting the group in jeopardy of getting shut down, as had happened to a few other groups in recent history.
Because of this, a few members got together and regained ownership of the group from the now-absent founder, and made membership in the group subject to approval by the new self-appointed moderators.
Because we needed a place to publish the new requirements, and the now-mandatory rules for members, AND because we realized the great wealth of experience, stories, and helpfulness among our members, David Miller built our first website in about 2010 or 2011, which served well until it became time to ensure the website could be continued by other volunteer members.
This rebuilt website is intended to preserve that experience, make useful information easier to find, and give members better tools for maintaining the group’s shared resources.
Learn More or Join Us
Read the BBCG Group Policies and the guidance for applicants and members. When you are ready, visit Join the BBCG. For another question, Contact Us.