Sheet music reviews: Three Blues for clarinet/alto saxophone and piano

If you pick up a piece of music with ‘Blues’ in the title, you often find a lick-laden, growly trudge around the 12-bar chord sequence of the same name. There's certainly a time and a place for this, particularly when introducing the style to beginners, but the clichés tire quickly on advancing players (and their teachers) as well as concert audiences.

Thankfully, Alan Bullard's Three Blues offers a more nuanced approach, taking inspiration not from America's Deep South but the more tepid clime of Colchester, Essex. Composed in 1995, these ‘blues-inspired sketches’ were written for three clarinet teachers at the Colchester Institute, where Bullard taught from 1975 to 2005. At the time, the Institute offered what could be described as a ‘third way’ for music students, sitting somewhere in between academically focused university courses and specialised conservatoire training. A key feature was the overlap between FE and HE courses, allowing for more collaboration between students of different age-groups.