Nineteen-year-old Erin Paton was still in high school in Colorado Springs, Colorado when she started writing big band charts for her school jazz band.

Now a music education major in her sophomore year at the University of Colorado Boulder College of Music, Paton has founded the Tuturu Jazz Orchestra with the help of the Entrepreneurship Center for Music at CU. Her mission is twofold:  to give her and other musicians a big band in which to play their own music; and to create a publishing company to give band members a way to market and sell their original compositions and arrangements. Tuturu, which means “natural” in the Maori language (Paton was born and raised for the first half of her life in New Zealand), reflects Paton’s belief that “music should express the human experience and what we’re going through as a human race and as individuals – that shouldn’t be left out of the music.”