Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras started in 1946 as a handful of students meeting on Saturday mornings at a Wurlitzer store on South Wabash Avenue, energized by a summer music camp and wanting to keep playing together once the school year started. By November 1947, that had grown into a hundred-musician debut concert at Orchestra Hall under the name Youth Orchestra of Greater Chicago.
The organization now runs 14 large ensembles spanning symphonic, jazz, and steel pan music, plus chamber groups and composition seminars — a genuinely broad training institution, not just one orchestra. In 2007, about 25 of its musicians made history as the first-ever orchestra to perform at Lollapalooza, backing My Morning Jacket on stage.