Bicoastal Collective coleaders Aaron Lington and Paul Tynan hail from two different parts of North America, California and Nova Scotia respectively. They share a musical friendship that dates back to the University of North Texas’s One O’Clock Lab Band. Their professional partnership has been prolific over the past 10 years. The latest example of this is their new big band album, “Chapter Five.” Paul Tynan was conceived in Fort Erie (Ontario) in 1975. When he was five years old, his family moved to Houston and Buffalo. He was thirteen when he moved to Buffalo. In sixth grade, he took up the trumpet. He studied at the Crane School of Music/SUNY, Potsdam, New York with Bret Zvacek, a trombonist and composer. He also heard some of the university’s jazz bands. However, he didn’t start playing jazz until he met Tim Hagans, a trumpeter, on a trip to Sweden. Aaron Lington was born in Houston in 1974 and grew up in the Highlands of Texas. He played guitar, piano, and violin before he took up alto and baritone jazz saxophones at high school. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Houston and then went on a few short tours with Bo Diddley, who he played the tenor sax. Tynan started his master’s degree in 2001 and is currently a teacher at St. Francis Xavier University. Many of his arrangements have been recorded by college bands. They can be found at Walrus Music Publishing, Eighth Note Publications and UNC Jazz Press as well as Maxwell Tree Music. Lington accepted the position at San Jose State University in 2004 after he received his doctorate from North Texas. His charts were performed by the Maynard Ferguson’s Big Bop Nouveau, the Count Basie Orchestra, and by the Pacific Mambo Orchestra in which he plays. Lington arranged four of the songs on the mambo orchestra’s debut album, which won the 2014 Grammy Award. Lington arranged four of the numbers on the 19-member mambo orchestra’s 2014 Grammy Award-winning debut album.
