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

108 has to be able to live and have a life, and show the life, whether with vibrato or not. Or, series of notes have to have a path and a direction, and then you leave that path or direction, and go on to another series of notes. It’s that kind of expressivity that I think is important. Third movement. I always thought the improvisation section is very challenging in the third movement. Because the chords he writes, and I’ll be very specific, and he disagrees with me, are not the chords that I play, I don’t think. They’re hard, but I just hear certain a kind of modal or kind of pattern if you transcribe my solo. You might be better to talk to Julian Velasco, who transcribed this, or those guys…or another type of jazz approach, they can give you a little more sense of that. And a lot of it’s just the way I hear the underpinning of that. It’s so hard to get out of bar 88 and 89, because when you’re in the midst of a jazz improvisation, you’re not counting, ‘1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4’ and however it comes in and you’ve got to wrap it back in. So you’ve got to almost be a little more patient. It’s kind of like the art of yielding. Don’t play too many notes but just kind of let it float a little bit. And then you can kind of…working to make sure the improvisations don’t stifle the line. That the improvisations flow more directly into the line, so an audience member, like yourself, or a listener, would say, ‘Oh my gosh! Was that improvised? Or was it written?’ And that’s, I think, important for the performer. At the end, I asked him to move this up an octave. He never heard it, that’s why the 8va is there (measure 134 – original score – marked as described in current edition). That was my suggestion if I may be so bold as to say, that was pretty good. So he listened to me. And I always thought that in the 3 rd movement, I still have a concern. It’s not an argument against Steven. It’s just the fact, you never hear…first of all, he gave the option not to play this (original score – altissimo notes in the soloist part with the eighth note chords from 201 to 208), so I take 8 bars out. I did play this in the original, on the YouTube version. JENKINS: Yeah LULLOFF: And then I took it out in the recording. And it was much better. Because I needed rest on the chops in the third movement. I mean, you’re sitting there blowing your brains out, and you’re about nineteen minutes in, right? Twenty minutes in, twenty-two minutes in the concerto. By the way, the concerto was supposed to be fifteen minutes. JENKINS: (Laughs) Was it really? LULLOFF: And we got a hell of a deal. JENKINS: Oh yeah, LULLOFF: Just a hell of a deal. You get a composer who likes to write for the instrument like that. And I hope that people will play it.