Minterview: Saxophonist Tim McAllister

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[Minterview = mini-interview]

Saxophonist Tim McAllister is as comfortable in a jazz club as he is on the concert stage.  Praised by the New York Times as “one of the foremost saxophonists of his generation,” Mr. McAlister has appeared with symphony orchestras around the world as well as with big bands, regional music theater ensembles, and studio orchestra touring productions.  He has also performed with big jazz names like saxophonists Jimmy Heath, Rick Margitza, and Dave Liebman as well as with trumpeter Ed Sarath.  He's in town this week to perform and record John Adams's "Saxophone Concerto" with the St. Louis Symphony for a Nonesuch CD that will include the performance of Adams's "City Noir" that he recorded in concert with the symphony last season.  I threw him a few questions about his career and the music he's performing this weekend.

Photo: Ernie Tacsik

Q: Saxophone soloists don't have anything like the high public profile of soloists on other instruments, at least in the classical world.  What made you decide to pursue that career path?

A: You’re correct that the saxophone has something of a “low profile” in the classical world.  When you think about orchestral soloists, it’s an elite society; many of the same major figures on violin, cello, and piano.  One might think, therefore, that the role of classical saxophone is limited, but, in fact, the saxophone in classical music is quite rich and deep. It just exists more in the realm of niche chamber music and solo recital literature.
Major universities like mine, Northwestern, and its counterparts (Indiana, University of Michigan, Eastman, among many others) all have thriving saxophone programs devoted to classical instruction and literature. This doesn't even take into account the countless conservatories worldwide that offer classical saxophone, and the professional organizations committed to further its cause, such as the North American Saxophone Alliance and the World Saxophone Congress.

For those of us that choose to pursue this path, the number of iconic (classical) figures in the last 150 years rivals that of other instruments, as well as the obvious luminaries in jazz. However, it is largely an 'academic' path that has thrived at the university level, yet has made major strides in breaking into the larger classical community over the years. My mentors were part of this movement to bring the instrument more into the concert hall, as their mentors were before them, and I feel like it is part of my mission to continue this track.
Of course, the instrumentation of the modern symphony orchestra has been set for a long time, but skilled freelance players are still necessary to fill the parts that we see come about each season in orchestras all over the country by Bartok, Bernstein, Berg, Bizet, Britten, Ravel, Gershwin, Prokofiev, Vaughan-Williams, among hundreds of other composers to choose from that included saxophone in their orchestrations. To have even the slightest chance to be among the privileged few who get the chance to play these parts, in addition to the possibility of a solo career devoted to promoting new works by living composers alongside work with an active saxophone quartet, was worth all the effort and hard work over the years; because, ultimately, even though I was attracted to the the instrument because of its huge presence in popular culture and my early love of jazz, it was classical art music fused with the voice of the saxophone that spoke to me the most.

Q: You performed in the world premieres John Adams's "City Noir" as well as his "Saxophone Concerto".  What appeals to you about his music? 

A: I have always adored John's music. I heard the premiere of his famous opera "Nixon in China" almost 30 years ago with my private teacher at the time playing in the saxophone section. I was riveted, puzzled, surprised, and inspired all at once. All I had known to that point was school concert band music, jazz and the 80's fusion/R&B movement, rock, some orchestral music and the handful of appropriate level saxophone solos I might be assigned for lessons from week to week. "Nixon" was huge, a spectacle. It really didn't even dawn on me that this was 'classical' music. It seemed bigger than that label. I went on to be curious about this sphere of music that existed beyond what popular culture understood orchestra and opera music was supposed to be: music by dead, European men. I think from then on, and certainly once in college, I realized 'contemporary' classical music might have a place for me.

John became the “Number One” composer on my list whom I dreamed someday would write a major work for saxophone. It seemed like a 'no-brainer' given the grandeur, rhythmic drive, and indelible link to vernacular styles in his post-minimal works. Since Philip Glass and Terry Riley had such an affinity for saxophone, it just seemed logical that Adams might be next.  However, apart from the saxophone quartet parts in John's "Nixon" and "Fearful Symmetries," the saxophone wasn't really there in his music until "City Noir" came along in 2009. "City Noir" changed everything. It was (is!) demanding, difficult, taxing, you name it. But, it's exhilarating, and, as Gustavo Dudamel once said in an NPR interview, the piece "is about the saxophone."

Photo: rrjones

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges in playing these works?

A: "Noir," like the new "Concerto," creates enormous challenges for the player to spin seemingly endless passages of intervallic writing, sometimes, at peak volume to project over large orchestral textures, while displaying a precision of rhythm that is almost unattainable. The virtuosity demanded of the player centers around total control sustained over long spans of music, even requiring circular breathing in places. The concentration required can be exhausting.

Q: How do you think that experience of playing in both the classical and pop/jazz worlds informs your playing of Adam's music?

A: Well, one must have a deep color palette to choose from when playing these Adams works. The music in the "Concerto" is not jazz nor is it typical classical writing for the instrument, but characteristics of both must pervade the player's approach at all times. In the end, it's all still John Adams  -- that is foremost in my mind. To distract from that fact might create a caricature of the music he is emulating. One critic recently lauded the "Concerto" as a work that does more to "evoke rather than reproduce" jazz music, quite possibly in the seamless way in which one might view Gershwin's or Bernstein's music, so the saxophone has to be such a chameleon, something it does so well. Although I have always loved and studied jazz, I don't consider myself a jazz artist by any means, but I wouldn't be comfortable calling myself a saxophonist, either, if I didn't recognize and incorporate jazz concepts, history and pedagogy into my overall musical awareness. I think this is what John perceived in my Los Angeles performances of "City Noir" [recorded for the DG Concerts label], and he felt he had that broad palette to work with in me when it came time to consider the new Concerto.

I have to say if I hadn't loved jazz first, I wouldn’t be the classical player I am today.

Urban Legends

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson with pianist Orli Shaham
What: Music of Copland, Bernstein, and John Adams
Where: Powell Symphony Hall
When: February 15-16, 2013

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“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.” – Raymond Chandler, Red Wind (1938)

In his notes for the 2009 world premiere of City Noir by the Los Angeles Philharmonic composer John Adams doesn’t list Raymond Chandler as a source of inspiration, although he does mention Chinatown and The Naked City (which are surely related). Listening to the bravura performance of City Noir that closed Friday morning’s concert, though, it was that quote from the beginning of Red Wind that came immediately to mind.

Like that story, City Noir is a mix of violence (sometime suppressed, sometimes overt) and sensuality with an “anything can happen” edginess. Written for a large orchestra, including a massive percussion section, a jazz drummer, and an alto sax soloist, the music has the kind of cinematic sweep that suggests a classic private eye flick on steroids. It’s mostly exciting stuff but after a while, especially towards the end of the frenzied first movement, “The City and Its Double,” I began to feel a bit like Marlowe after a working-over by a couple of thugs. This is complex music, but subtle it mostly ain’t.

Still, it gave Mr. Robertson and his forces a chance to show what fine musicians they are. Everyone played well, of course, but Principal Tim Meyers’s “walking” trombone solo in the second movement and Acting Principal Tom Drake’s performance of what Adams describes as a “moody ‘Chinatown’ trumpet solo” in the third were standouts. So was the virtuoso alto sax work of guest soloist Tim McAllister. Principal horn Roger Kaza and the new Principal Violist Beth Guterman Chu also had nice moments in one of the work’s few quieter passages at the end of the second movement. Mr. Robertson conducted with his usual all-in commitment and precision.

This weekend’s performances of City Noir are being recorded by Nonesuch for a later commercial release along with Adams’s Saxophone Concerto (which the symphony is performing in October). I think the record company will be pleased with the results. They’ll also be happy with the lack of coughs, cell phones, or other audience noise during the softer passages, demonstrating that people actually can be quiet when they put their minds to it—or at least when symphony CEO Fred Bronstein makes a personal appeal to do so before the concert.

Orli Shaham
Photo Credit: Christian Steiner

Like City Noir, Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 ("The Age of Anxiety") is urban music. In Bernstein’s case, though, New York is just the backdrop for musings on the difficulty of finding The Meaning of Life in an age when God is either dead or (to quote Walt Kelly) merely unemployed.

The program for this hybrid of piano concerto and symphony comes from W. H. Auden’s 1947 epic poem of the same name about four angst-ridden young people who meet in a New York bar and try to find the answer to, as Douglas Adams put it, the question of “Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Over the course of the work’s six sections the protagonists reflect on the meaning of life, fantasize about happiness, mourn the death of God (Auden’s “Colossal Dad”), abandon themselves to hedonism in a late-night party, and finally find some sort of faith, or at least a sense of resolution. In a 1977 press conference at the offices of Deutsche Gramophon (where Bernstein was recording Age of Anxiety), the composer said that resolution was the “Buddhistic idea” that God was everywhere.” That notion is probably more Bernstein than Auden, of course.

That’s pretty ambitious stuff for a purely orchestral work (although no more so than, say, Also Sprach Zarathustra) but even without the extra-musical program, The Age of Anxiety still makes perfect sense, with a clearly laid-out structure and irresistible thematic material that is classic Bernstein. Indeed, in the 1977 interview cited above, the composer said that the work had “acquired a life of its own” and that the poem and the symphony were no longer “mutually integral.”

Speaking of interviews, in a Valentine’s Day interview for St. Louis Magazine piano soloist Orli Shaham notes that she and her husband Maestro Robertson have frequently collaborated on Age of Anxiety. “I feel in many ways as I’ve grown with the piece,” she says. “We’ve grown with it together. It’s grown in direct relation to what the other one of us thinks about the piece.” Indeed, Mr. Robertson has even prepared the version of the score she uses (cut and pasted to minimize page turning).

No surprise, then, that their performance Friday morning was of the “two minds with but a single thought” variety. Ms. Shaham was strongly invested in the music, to the point where you could almost see her acting out the parts of Auden’s characters. I’ve always found this somewhat theatrical aspect of Ms. Shaham’s keyboard style very appealing, especially given her formidable technique, and Friday was no exception. Mr. Robertson’s direction made the most of the dramatic contrasts in the score and the overall result was just stunning. The standing ovation that followed should have gone on longer and would have if it had been up to me.

As in the Adams, there were some solo performances in the orchestra that deserve a nod. Tina Ward and Principal Scott Andrews were perfect in the highly exposed clarinet duet that opens the work; Principal double bassist Erik Harris tore up the joint with his “slap bass” part in “The Masque”, which also featured some very flashy work by the percussion section; and Peter Henderson provided some nice accents on celesta and the small (but critical) offstage piano part that Bernstein (as he notes in that 1977 interview) uses as a way to indicate “the separation of self from reality.”

The concert opened with Copland’s short suite of themes from his score for the 1939 film version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This peaceful evocation of Grovers Corners, the fictional New England “everytown” of the early 20th century, is about as distant from the tightly wound urban soundscapes of Adams and Bernstein as you can get. But, like them, it strongly evokes a sense of place and time. Mr. Robertson’s interpretation stressed the lyrical a bit more than I prefer, but it was a lovely performance nevertheless. The applause for it was shockingly brief, I thought, given the quality of the performance. Maybe the audience was insufficiently caffeinated.

Next on the regular calendar: There’s a Black History Month concert with the IN UNISON® Chorus on Thursday, February 22 at 7:30 PM and an appearance by jazz trumpeter Chris Botti on Friday, February 23, also at 7:30. The regular season resumes on Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2, at 8 PM with Delius’s The Walk to the Paradise Garden, Elgar’s Violin Concerto (with Tasmin Little), and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. Sir Andrew Davis conducts. For ticket information: stlsymphony.org.