Melissa Aldana finds success on own terms
Acclaimed jazz saxophonist brings her quartet to four Bay Area concerts
By necessity and inclination, many of jazz's leading musicians have embraced multitasking, simultaneously pursuing several projects at once.
Chilean-born tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, 34, has taken a different path. She's got a one-track mind. The quartet she brings to the Bay Area this week for four concerts is her band, period. It's the group she tours with, composes for and uses to cultivate her music.
“I've been very lucky, all the guys are committed,” she said in a recent call from her home in Brooklyn. “The hard thing is to go against the market, where there's pressure to do a new project all the time. I'm constantly fighting for it. This is the band, and it takes time to develop a sound of your own.”
Aldana's quartet plays a series of high-profile concerts this week, including tonight at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage and Friday at San Jose's intimate Hammer4 Studio as part of the Hammer Theatre Center's Black Cab Jazz series.
The run continues Saturday at Santa Cruz's Kuumbwa Jazz Center and concludes Sunday afternoon at Half Moon Bay's Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society.
The group is built on bassist Pablo Menares, who like Aldana grew up in Santiago, Chile, and has worked with her since she founded her first touring group about a decade ago, Crash Trio. They bonded as teenagers in 2006 playing in a band backing trumpet star Randy Brecker when he was in Chile working with young players and both ended up moving to New York in 2009.
“He's one of my favorite musicians,” she said. “That he's also Chilean and we can speak Spanish together is very lucky.”
The quartet's most recent addition is 27-yearold Israeli pianist Gadi Lehavi, a startlingly gifted improviser who's performed widely with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. And Aldana has known drummer Kush Abadey since they were students at Berklee College of Music in the early 2000s, though Aldana was a few years ahead. They played together in an ensemble led by the late drum maestro Ralph Peterson, but didn't perform together around Boston.
She started calling him for gigs about six years ago, “and it never felt like she was hiring me as a sub,” Abadey said. “This was morphing into a new permanent situation, and as soon as we started playing it felt very natural to put my own spin on it. She's always configured her band around all these individuals coming together and what that sounds like specifically.”
Menares and Abadey are featured on her sixth and latest album, “12 Stars,” which marked her debut on the venerable label Blue Note. Released last March, the album was shaped both by the experience of the pandemic and the massive “Estallido Social” protests that shook Chile in 2019. The protesters were met with brutal repression, including nonlethal projectiles that left hundreds of people blinded, which inspired her skittering tune “Los Ojos de Chile.”
“It's hard not to feel part of it when it's happening with my generation,” she said. “Of course I feel very connected.”
A third-generation saxophonist — her father is the accomplished jazz musician Marcos Aldana — she gained widespread notice in 2013 when she became the first female instrumentalist and the first South American to win the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition. (Her father had been a semifinalist in the 1991 contest that catapulted Joshua Redman to stardom.)
In her mid-20s she seized the opportunity to tour and record, and if she missed the extended apprenticeships that can provide invaluable seasoning she embraced the responsibilities of building an ensemble.
“For some reason it always natural to be a bandleader,” she said. “I didn't get to play with the elders as much as I would have liked. But I thought by having good gigs and hiring people who play better than me I could advance.”
She did get to spend time around some veteran masters, like saxophonist and composer Jimmy Heath, who exemplified “how your energy can affect everyone in the room, making them feel part of something bigger,” she said.
By concentrating her prodigious energy into the quartet, Aldana has become a leading force in jazz: “12 Stars” was voted one of 2022's 20 best albums in the widely respected Francis Davis Jazz Poll. She appreciates the recognition, but what pleases her most is the sound she's hearing from the band.
“There are times you have to make sacrifices to see the bigger picture,” she said. “I've been committed to this for a long time and it's paid off, not just gig-wise, but in how the music is coming together.”