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

34 ostinato in the treble voice of the piano continues at the slower rate while the soloist plays this bop-ish interruption. Bryant’s comfort with placing jazz elements within the more austere form of his large works is notable. Bryant’s father, a music educator, was a master’s student studying trumpet performance at North Texas State (now the University of North Texas) in the 60’s. He performed in the Two O’Clock Lab Band, occasionally subbing in the top One O’Clock Lab Band. Bryant used a transcription of a jazz solo performed by his father in his Concerto for Wind Ensemble as one of its primary compositional elements. 39 It is clear in his music that he has a comfort with jazz and finds a way to make it fit within the context of a concert work, without it sounding foreign or forced into the mold. The inspiration for the sudden interruption was a product of a visit that Lulloff paid to Bryant early in 2014. Bryant gave Lulloff some material from the third movement to work from and asked him to improvise over it. Bryant recorded Lulloff improvising for about ten minutes. As Bryant described it later, “those little bursts 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.” 40 39 Guy Malcolm Holliday, “Steven Bryant’s Concerto for Wind Ensemble : Musical Analysis and Considerations for Conductors” DMA diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2013, 15. 40 Steven Bryant, interview by author, phone interview, March 8, 2018.