Cover Session Garrop

Premiere Performance of David Maslanka's Concerto for Alto Saxophone and String Orchestra: 
Joseph Lulloff, Alto Saxophone
Lansing Symphony Orchestra, Tim Muffitt Conductor
October 11 ,2008

Live Performance - Wharton Center for the Arts

Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra - mvt.5  Song: "Mortal, have you seen this?"

Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra - mvt.4 Interlude: "Starry Night"

Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra - mvt.3  Song: "Dear Jesus, what have you DONE?!"

Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra - mvt.2 Interlude: "Bright Window, Your Night is Full of Stars"

Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra -  mvt.1  Song: "Fire in the Earth"

Performance of Claude Debussy's Raphsodie with the Asheville Symphony Orchestra

Live in Concert with the Asheville (NC) Symphony Orchestra

Raphsodie pour Saxophone and Orchestra - Claude Debussy

Performance of Darius Milhaud's "Scaramouche pour Saxophone and Orchestra"with the Asheville Symphony Orchestra

Joseph Lulloff with the Asheville (NC) Symphony Orchestra

Milhaud - Scaramouche with Orchestra

Performance by Steven Bryant's Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Ensemble by Joseph Lulloff and the US Navy Band at the 2017 Navy Band Saxophone Symposium, January 2017.

Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Ensemble - by  Steven BRYANT

From Charles Ruggiero: 
STRAYHORN was written for my friends Joseph Lulloff and Jun Okada during the seven days from December 26, 1999, to New Year's Day, 2000. Although I hadn't planned on spending that week writing music, when Joe asked me (late in November) to arrange "some jazz" for his appearance at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall on January 26, 2000, I just couldn't say no. The sponsors of Joe's recital, the New York Pro Musicis association, had suggested that he include some jazz on his program, and when Joe contacted me I immediately proposed an extended concert arrangement based on several songs and instrumental pieces of Billy Strayhorn. The choice of Strayhorn's music was easy; it was stimulated in part by my interest in Strayhorn's compositions and in part by Joe's admiration for the distinctive alto saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges, one of Strayhorn's colleagues in the Duke Ellington enterprise. (The attentive listener may recognize a brief reference to Strayhorn's musical tribute to Hodges, "Johnny Come Lately," at the very end of the arrangement.)

Although their emotional expressiveness and melodic beauty are quite captivating, it is the harmonic sophistication of Billy Strayhorn's compositions that is most intriguing to me. As José Hosiasson states in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Strayhorn's "ballads . . . are harmonically and structurally among the most sophisticated in jazz." This sophistication is not surprising, considering the excellent early musical training that Strayhorn received, his intellectual curiosity, and his extraordinary gift for composition.

After spending nearly three decades as Duke Ellington's closest musical collaborator, Billy Strayhorn died somewhat in the shadow of jazz's greatest composer and bandleader. During his lifetime, some of Strayhorn's music, like the well-known theme song of Ellington's band, "Take the 'A' Train," was assumed by many to be Duke's work. But recently a number of performers and scholars have begun to better understand the significance of Strayhorn's contributions to Ellington's output and to reappraise Strayhorn's independent work.

This arrangement for alto saxophone and piano of Strayhorn works is intended to pay homage to Billy Strayhorn by helping to bring his music to the recital stage. It's my hope that in this piece two different performance practices (one involving improvisation, the other not) are blended effectively, resulting in a work that can be presented convincingly by musicians who are at ease with fully notated "art music" but not averse to improvisation. This approach seems appropriate, since Strayhorn was rooted in the traditions of both jazz and European "classical" music.

    "He was my listener, my most dependable appraiser, and as a critic he would be the most clinical, but his background--both classical and modern--was an accessory to his own good taste and understanding, so what came back to me was in perfect balance."
Duke Ellington (from his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress)

STRAYHORN is based on the following compositions (listed in order of their appearance in the arrangement):

Day Dream (Ellington/Strayhorn, 1941)

Rain Check (Strayhorn, 1942)

A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing (Strayhorn, 1941)

Blood Count (Strayhorn, 1967)

Upper Manhattan Medical Group--also known as "U.M.M.G." (Strayhorn, 1956)

Take the "A" Train (Strayhorn, 1941)

Johnny Come Lately (Strayhorn, 1942)

- Charles Ruggiero (December, 2000)

Joe Lulloff

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