CONCERTO FOR ALTO SAXOPHONE and BAND by EVAN CHAMBERS (USA, 1963)
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
[#358] June 01, 2026
USA | 2008 | Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Band | Grade 5 | 12’ | Solo Work
Premiered by West Point Band
Publish and purchase/rental at Evan Chambers
Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Band by American composer and educator Evan Chambers is our Composition of the Week.
The Concerto was wommissioned and premiered by the Wayne Tice and the West Point Band in 2010. It is cast in three movements:
1. This Is not the Blues;
2. Little Song for Two Bills;
3. Heavy Traffic – Looking for Louie
The work has a duration of 12 minutes, and it is scored for standard wind band setting, including String Bass and Piano.
“When I lived for a year in Austria after college, I found to my surprise that I was in demand as a blues singer at parties. I had never sung the blues before that time and had no especial right to do so except for the sorrowful ache I felt in my gut at nearly all times. I was not raised on the blues, could not play the blues on guitar or on my viola, and had almost no experience as a vocalist. I was just a white boy from Ohio and somehow, I stumbled onto the fact of my Americanness in a foreign land. While I was in Eastern Europe, I made up spontaneous blues rants for my fellow students (who were also white privileged Northerners). The songs had titles like Suburban Intellectual Blues, Castration Blues, and even a rather more earnest East Berlin Blues after we saw a young man who had befriended us carted away by the secret police. All I can say was that, to paraphrase the great John Lee Hooker: it was in me, and it had to come out. I have never sung the blues in public since, and probably what I was doing then didn’t count as anything but a kind of culturally dislocated caricature that we conjured up to feel more strongly how out of place we were. I think we needed to remind ourselves of how very dissonant our own memorized subcutaneous cultural encoding was with our immediate surroundings. There is the famous Sonny Terry/Brownie McGee song, White Boy Lost in the Blues, and I certainly was. Lost. Lonely. Certainly, unschooled in the blues, and incapable of any claims of authenticity. But I also found the ability to lose myself in the performance, to become so steeped in strong feeling that the sounds just took me over and I didn’t have to be with myself anymore. I could just be a voice, pouring out the shame and hurt and bafflement of a foreigner who doesn’t fit in, can’t speak the language, and doesn’t know the rules. It was liberating to let go, let some humor creep in, and open up wide. Urgency times sweat plus irony over pain equals… So, this piece is not the blues. It carries some of the markers of my experience with that music and breaks into frequent approximate style-quotes. This piece is more like the painting of a pipe by Magritte, which is labeled “Cest ne pas un pipe.” This is just some music that tries to tap some of the energy generated from those goofy, angry, drunken moments of outpouring I experienced so many years ago. The second movement, Little Song for Two Bills is dedicated to Bill Albright and Bill Bolcom, who at one time were great friends, and were both colleagues and mentors of mine. The final movement gets two titles: starting out with Heavy Traffic and ending with an all-out tribute to the great Louie Prima. Thanks go to Marcin Bela, who gets a tip of the hat in the New Orleans section of the first movement. The piece was written for Wayne Tice and the USMA Band.” Program Note Evan Chambers
Dr. Evan Chambers received BM in viola performance at Bowling Green State University, and master's and DMA with high honors in composition at the University of Michigan. His composition teachers include William Albright, Leslie Bassett, Nicholas Thorne, and Marilyn Shrude, with studies in electronic music with George Wilson and Burton Beerman.
Dr. Chambers' compositions have been performed by the Cincinnati, Kansas City, Memphis, New Hampshire, and Albany Symphonies; he has also appeared as a soloist in Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra. He won first prize in the Cincinnati Symphony Competition, and in 1998 was awarded the Walter Beeler Prize by Ithaca College. His work has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Luigi Russolo Competition, Vienna Modern Masters, NACUSA, the American Composers Forum, and the Tampa Bay Composers Forum.
He has been a resident of the MacDowell Colony and been awarded individual artist grants from Meet the Composer, the Arts Foundation of Michigan and ArtServe Michigan.
Chambers is known for his intense vocal performances of his own works and is also an Irish-traditional fiddler. He appeared as the fiddle soloist in his Concerto for Fiddle and Violin at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra (its second Carnegie performance) and his orchestral song-cycle The Old Burying Ground was also performed in Carnegie Hall.
Dr. Chambers is currently associate professor of composition at the University of Michigan. He also serves as resident composer with the new-music ensemble Quorum.
Other works for winds include:
• Polka Nation (1996)
• Outcry and Turning (2012)
• Crazed for the Flame for winds (transc. for WE by the composer, 2021)
• Kairos (transc. for WE by the composer, 2026)
More on Evan Chambers
