My teacher has suggested trying to improvise over a blues progression.
For various reasons I've barely touched my saxes since, I'm after some listening recommendations to give me a little bit of inspiration.
So what should I be listening to?
Well, if you're just trying to get a handle on the basic 12 bar blues, you're going to want to stay simple. C Jam Blues; Hound Dog; Blues for Alice; Jeep's Blues; Kansas City; Rock around the Clock; Blue Monk, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum.
If you want to "play the blues", stylistically, then you need to consider ALL the different ways this can be done, from Robert Johnson and a single guitar, T Bone Walker, Cab Calloway, Charlie Parker, B B King, Albert King, Freddie King, the King, Billie Jean King, Don King... (sorry, inside joke there), Stevie Ray Vaughan, Coltrane, Mingus, Led Zeppelin, and so on, and so on, and so on.
In popular music and African American improvised music, the 12 bar blues progression and its variants is probably the single most common chord progression. There's no shortage of "blues tunes". If you want to emulate Ellington's band, focusing on grindy rumpty rumpty electric blues may not be the shortest path; if you would like to play for sweaty dances at Kingston Mines some day, learning all the Charlie Parker Bird-Blues substitutions may not be the shortest path.
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