A short while back, I was emailed by Karyn Weber, a founder-member of Clarinet Fusion - a clarinet choir in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

Karyn kindly let me know that they had recently bought my Lone Ar-ranger for the ensemble, and that it had gone down well with audiences at recent concerts in June and July.

Karyn went on to say: ’Our group is playing a benefit concert at a church at the end of September for which the theme is “A Night in New Orleans”. When the Saints Go Marching In would have been perfect!’

I was able to come up with this in time, and have given it a traditional jazz-band treatment where each of the players gets a chance to elaborate on the tune, either singly, or in conjunction with another instrument. There’s also a customary key-change thrown in for good measure, and there are ’snippets’ as well of a few other tunes along the way, but not, of course, in the way this happens in The Lone Ar-ranger or Can-can alla Rossini.

Having created a Clarinet Choir version, as with many of my other arrangements, it seemed logical then to adapt this to suit the other instrumental combinations I usually write for, of course, with some harmonic adjustment here and there, to accommodate a different number of players, and sometimes a change of key, to get the best out of the particular instruments involved.

In accordance with the rest of my arrangement for Saxophone Quartet (Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Baritone), I have also included an optional Alto Saxophone part. This extends the quartet into a quintet. However, the quartet version is complete in itself, if the optional second alto part isn’t required.

If there’s a part you’d like, and it isn’t already included, then I can usually come up with it!

N.B. The attached MP3 file is the full Quintet version, rather than the one for quartet.