In a recent work Killip and Nenciu gave random recurrences for the characteristic polynomials of certain unitary and real orthogonal upper Hessenberg matrices. The corresponding eigenvalue p.d.f.'s are beta-generalizations of the classical groups. Left open was the direct calculation of certain Jacobians. We provide the sought direct calculation. Furthermore, we show how a multiplicative rank 1 perturbation of the unitary Hessenberg matrices provides a joint eigenvalue p.d.f generalizing the circular beta-ensemble, and we show how this joint density is related to known inter-relations between circular ensembles. Projecting the joint density onto the real line leads to the derivation of a random three-term recurrence for polynomials with zeros distributed according to the circular Jacobi beta-ensemble.

Our interest is in the scaled joint distribution associated with $k$-increasing subsequences for random involutions with a prescribed number of fixed points. We proceed by specifying in terms of correlation functions the same distribution for a Poissonized model in which both the number of symbols in the involution, and the number of fixed points, are random variables. From this, a de-Poissonization argument yields the scaled correlations and distribution function for the random involutions. These are found to coincide with the same quantities known in random matrix theory from the study of ensembles interpolating between the orthogonal and symplectic universality classes at the soft edge, the interpolation being due to a rank 1 perturbation.