As co-founding mother Harriet Choice put it “And one thing led to another, and…”in the article she wrote for the first issue of the Jazz Institute’s Jazz Sheet in March-April 1969. The Originators, comprised a group representative of Chicago’s jazz community at that time. With traditional musicians Art Hodes, George Finola, Wayne Jones and Franz Jackson, innovator Muhal Richard Abrams, bebop guardian Joe Segal, blues aficionado and record purveyor Bob Koester, writers Harriet Choice and Dan Morgenstern and others the group quickly decided that “ The Jazz Institute of Chicago is an attempt to organize Jazz, an attempt to unify the various schools of Jazz while maintaining the individuality or creative process of all of its several beautiful forms. The fact that musicians–and they must be the nucleus for such a project–from traditional to avant-garde can plan a concert together is a sign that the project is working”.