A Conductor’s and Performer’s Guide to Steven Bryant’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone - Chester Jenkins

100 it?’ And he also kind of gave me a little bit of a chord progression in there. And I remember sitting in his front room. And the way he graphs it, you should probably look at it. JENKINS: He showed me his current project… LULLOFF: Oh, it’s pretty incredible. So, where’s the second movement here? JENKINS: We’re in it right there LULLOFF: So all of these are snippets of my improvisations. And these are not the original improvisations. But, just excerpts or transcriptions that he made from me just, you know, playing for about ten minutes in his studio. I just started playing. I don’t even remember what key I was in. And I practiced some things. But he didn’t tell me to practice something specifically when I got down. That was on the spot for me. That was like Saturday morning, got up, 10 o’clock or whenever we met. Bam! Here we are. And I started playing a little bit. And I don’t know, I didn’t play Take the A Train or any jazz standard or I didn’t play Miles Davis or Charlie Parker. But I am a very bebop influenced saxophonist. JENKINS: Yeah LULLOFF: I mean, I love Sonny Stitt. I could hang the moon with Sonny Stitt. And I could hang the moon with Count Basie and with Duke Ellington. And I mean I just love those bands. And Thad Jones/Mel Lewis I couldn’t get enough of. And I played in big band all the time, you know. And well I directed big band. And I did a ton of Thad/Mel. Not as much of Ellington as I’ve always wanted to. Didn’t have the cats who could play clarinet and flute. JENKINS: Yeah, that’s… LULLOFF: But this was at the University of Illinois and as a GA at Michigan State and then my early days at Michigan State. So I heard these kind of bebop lines, particularly more influenced by some of the great alto players in Thad and Mel: Jerry Dodgion lines. He played lead for a while with them. But also then Cannonball Adderly, and Sonny Stitt. And those are the cats that I grew up with. I have every Sonny Stitt record I could get my hands on in the 70’s and 80’s. So a lot of the genesis of that is probably from that. And that was it. And then we worked on a couple of other things. He had me play, ‘Can you play this?’ (Sings lines from first movement) First movement, I just want to have you pay. I’d practiced it a little bit you know, he says, ‘Oh my God, you got that really fast.’ That first page, maybe half of the first page. He showed it to me, I played it. It falls in my fingers. JENKINS: Oh yeah