In Arabesque, a work in three movements, we hear the mystical sounds of Middle Eastern music. The first movement opens with a taqasim, a passage written out in notes but played freely – similar to jazz improvisation. In this case, the alto saxophone plays in bi-tonal harmonic minor scales, in which a note even ‘bends’ to capture the micro-tonality (quarter tones) of the music from this part of the world. However, unlike in jazz, taqasim, which is usually found at the beginning of a piece of musi...