Jazz arrangers don’t so much make silk purses out of sows’ ears as make silk purses silkier.

The professional arrangements sourced by Paul Hornsby, musical director of the GGYJO, demonstrated that to a fault on a four-day course culminating in this hugely accomplished public concert.

Moreover, the belief that jazz can’t be taught is confounded by Hornsby’s orchestra and his tutor colleagues, who have imparted respect and enthusiasm for learning the basic skills.

By now the orchestra is pretty much sure-footed, yet its real achievement is in displaying cohesion when it is always, by definition, fluid. Young musicians grow older and move on.

Its finest moments came at this appearance before a full house when confidently-blown ensemble passages were driven by a rhythm section playing at full boiler house pressure and encouraged by solos from a few members of the training team - guitarist Chris Fry, trombonist Gareth Roberts and trumpeter Ceri Williams.

As Hornsby announced, it’s a ‘chameleon band’, which this time concentrated on the funkier sounds of rock and Latin-America but took in pop (the Beatles) and Count Basie-style swing (Neal Hefti’s Splanky). ZZ Top’s Legs might have been the only sow’s ear of the evening from which an anonymous arranger had made a smooth accessory.

Solos that raise the heat are the biggest ask for musicians this young but they stood up and had a go, while the solidity and colour - the book-ending brass choir in She’s Leaving Home, for example - formed the foundations with that muscle-pumping rhythm team.

Following savage and despicable cuts in funding, the Gwent Music schools support team of tutors, which coaches, rehearses and presents award-winning bands and orchestras, soldiers on. No-one is pretending that things are as they were but damage-limitation and appeals for cash from alternative providers continue.

Even the GGYJO and Paul Hornsby have diversified within the group, by hiving off a ten-piece ‘chamber’ jazz band that includes a vibraphone. It’s called the NYC Jazz Collective and its performance of Oliver Nelson’s Stolen Moments to open the second half of this concert was a muted and more sophisticated expression of what was heard more vociferously elsewhere. That vibraphone also turned up in the big band to interesting effect.

Such diversity is not only a mark of the GGYJO’s resourcefulness but also an indication to those who withheld their financial support of what variety might have been stilled. But then, these musicians have always worked wonders against the odds. What a shame the odds have shortened and how fitting it is that music’s voice can still be heard, for the time being at least.

Perhaps in the title of this concert’s final and white-hot item, The Tower of Power’s There’s Only So Much Oil in the Ground, there was an opportunity for the audience to consider a paraphrase - that the willingness to perform more than one’s duties should always be limited by reasonable expectation. It never will, of course, musicians being nothing if not super-dedicated.