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

120 BRYANT: And that was really fun! So that is definitely one moment, and that may be the most prominent one. But then later at 87-88 (sings line) he did that lick, and then I just started weaving that in all over the place. JENKINS: Yeah, those licks lay so nicely! There’s music that obviously feels terrible when you play it and this is not one of those things, it’s just a really nice jazz lick that just lays well under the fingers. BRYANT: Yeah, yeah. It was fun to take those, knowing that they would have this player quality to them, because he played them. JENKINS: Yeah BRYANT: Ok now put myself in that box and it’s all quasi related to my motive anyway. That was a new way of working for me, I’m very solitary. Nobody gets in the process until I’m done with the piece and there it is and here’s the piece. JENKINS: Yeah BRYANT: This was at first, weird and uncomfortable but because of his musicality and the way he can take in what I was doing, very quickly and start filtering it, it was really, really fun! Now he has a lot of opinions, and the cadenza stuff has gone way….well I just let him go…it’s his piece. (both laugh) BRYANT: The original cadenza I wrote in there, which I don’t know if they…nah I don’t think they are still in there. It was just some of his improvisation, which I left in as a potential cadenza. But he didn’t want them, he wasn’t satisfied with it, it was him just screwing around he wanted to think about it and write all these new cadenzas so I just let him do that… But I really liked them…..I think it’s at 69, JENKINS: Yeah BRYANT: those little burst of fast tempo stuff, those are all direct transcriptions, where I would write the slow music and I would plop in a fragment of his improvisations in there, over it, and that disjunct, two world feeling was literally what was happening. JENKINS: Yeah BRYANT: And that tempo was about the same as the 3 rd movement because that’s where it’s from. JENKINS: Yeah that’s cool, to me that was one of things was so stark about this movement, it is so slow. That pulse that piano half notes that just sit there, and then this sudden flurry of activity at 18 and you get transported to another world for a second…it’s just long moving music. The 3 rd movement, the end of it, it’s pretty aggressive.