Melissa Aldana

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Melissa Aldana with the Jure Pukl Quartet (2015)

Melissa Aldana (born December 3, 1988 in Santiago de Chile ) is a Chilean jazz musician ( tenor saxophone ).

Live and act

Aldana, whose father Marcos Aldana became a semi-finalist in the 1991 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition as a saxophonist , learned alto saxophone from her father at the age of six . Under the influence of Sonny Rollins , she later switched to the tenor instrument. At the age of 16 she played with her own bands in the important jazz clubs of Chile's capital. In 2005 Danilo Pérez invited her to play at the Panama Jazz Festival . In 2006 she came to the United States, where she studied at Berklee College of Music .

After graduating in 2009, she moved to New York City , where George Coleman became her mentor and she performed at Blue Note , Smalls and Lincoln Centers . After she recorded her first album Free Fall for Greg Osby's label Inner Circle Music in 2010, Second Cycle followed in 2012 and Melissa Aldana & Crash Trio (on Concord , with Pablo Menares, bass, and Francisco Mela, drums) in 2014 . Another album with the Crash Trio, Back Home , was released in 2016, with Jochen Rückert replacing Mela on drums. In 2019 Motéma Music released her quintet album Visions , which is inspired by paintings by Frida Kahlo and her Latin American roots; on it she worked with Sam Harris , Pablo Menares, Tommy Crane and Joel Ross .

Aldana continued to record with Carmen París , Terri Lyne Carrington and Simona Premazzi ( The Lucid Dreamer ) and also performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival , Barcelona Jazz Festival , Copenhagen Jazz Festival , Twin Cities Jazz Festival ( Saint Paul (Minnesota) ) , Jazz Fest Wien , the Chilean Providencia Jazz Festival and Umbria Jazz . She performed at the 2014 SWR NEWJazz Meeting with Jakob Bro , Kirk Knuffke , Joe Martin , Jacob Sacks and RJ Miller . In 2019 she and her quartet (with guitarist Lage Lund , bassist Pablo Menares and drummer Kush Abadey ) gave one of the most interesting concerts at the JazzFest Berlin .

Prizes and awards

Aldana won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 2013 . She was also awarded the National Altazor Art Prize in Chile for the best album and the Lincoln Center Martin E. Segal Award . In 2015 she won the Down Beat Critic Polls in the Rising Star category. In 2019 she received her first Grammy nomination for "Elsewhere" (on her album Visions , 2019) in the category Best Improvised Jazz Solo .

Melissa Aldana with the Jure Pukl Quartet (2015)

Web links

Commons : Melissa Aldana  - collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Meeting Back Home (AllAboutJazz)
  2. ↑ With "Visions", Melissa Aldana Honors Frida Kahlo and the Legacy of Latina Art (Jazziz)
  3. ↑ Full of character and well thought out (DLF)
  4. ↑ Meet - Melissa Aldana ( Memento from January 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), profile on the website of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz
  5. ↑ 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards (2019): Nominations - Best Improvised Jazz Solo (Elsewhere)
personal data
SURNAME Aldana, Melissa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean jazz musician (tenor saxophone)
DATE OF BIRTH 3rd December 1988
PLACE OF BIRTH Santiago de Chile