The glorious freedom to express your deepest self, your
truest self, regardless of gender, age, or race, etc. is in abundance on
saxophonist/composer/bandleader/educator Melissa Aldana's fourth recording,
Visions (available on Motema Music, May 24, 2019).Influenced by the life and
works of Frida Kahlo (who Aldana has loved since childhood), Aldana's music
encapsulates bold, grand, inspiring strokes, improvisation/space, and the
finest filigree, which combine to create the richest of sonic tapestries,
resonating with an avalanche of humanity. "Frida to me is an artist that
embraces who she is through her art. She talks about ugliness, beauty, being a
female, religion, politics, love affairs, sexuality, but mostly, accepting
herself as an individual. This is a big part of how she engendered me to write
this music," reveals Aldana.
Since
beginning her life as a saxophonist at age six (first on alto, then upon
hearing Sonny Rollins immediately switching to tenor), Aldana has loved to transcribe
her heroes, people like Don Byas and Mark Turner. And, as a young painter she
would try to copy the works of her two favorite artists, Frida Kahlo and
Oswaldo Guayasamin. By her early teens she was a working musician, and was
personally invited by Danilo Perez to play at the Panama Jazz Festival. Aldana
graduated from Berklee in 2009 and moved to NYC that same year. At age 24, just
after recording her second album, she won the Thelonious Monk International
Jazz Saxophone Competition, prompting The Washington Post to describe her as
representing, "a new sense of possibility and direction in jazz."
Over the
past two years, leading up to the recording of Visions, Aldana has been
exploring this music through a variety of live contexts across the globe with
the Melissa Aldana Quintet. Beginning as mutual admirers of each other's
playing, the Quintet has transformed into a fearless, virtuosic ensemble of
explorers, traversing through new musical landscapes composed by Aldana.
Working informally as global jazz ambassadors, the Quintet has appeared at
Thailand's International Jazz Day and the Hong Kong International Jazz Day
Marathon. They have engaged in an open exchange of musical ideas and artistic
inspiration on nearly every continent, having been featured in Madrid, Granada,
Perth, Barcelona and the So What's Next? Jazz Festival in The Netherlands. They
have also appeared at mainstay NYC venues such as the Birdland, as well as
emerging artist hotspots such as The Miller Theater at Columbia University.
Aldana
recently led her quintet through explorations of "Visions: For Frida
Kahlo," her original suite commissioned by The Jazz Gallery as part of its
residency program for emerging artists. The suite premiered in June 2018 to
immediate and ongoing enthusiasm, and now, Aldana happily and proudly presents
Visions, her full-length album of new music on Motema, influenced by Kahlo's
life and works.
The genesis
of Visions took place as Aldana was working through some changes in an effort
to seek and refine her voice, and raison d'être as an artist. Frida Kahlo began
to emerge as a pivotal figure in Aldana's work and quest for honest
representation of self. Aldana elaborates, "Like Kahlo's and Guayasamin's
works, this album became a path for my own identity and expression. My hope is
that this contribution is my first of many that will continue advancing my
concepts and convictions."
The
composition "Visions," originally part of the Jazz Gallery
commission, is emblematic of the album as a whole. This movement is the musical
representation and the sound of Aldana's explorations of self-identity that
every artist faces, and includes feelings of pain, mistrust, exhilaration and
relief. She explains, "experimenting both harmonically and rhythmically
with moments of frantic movement interspersed with order and structure is one
of the ways I conjure the messiness, struggles and heartbreaking contradictions
present in these visions of identity and self-worth."
"La
Madrina" explores the concept of the "Godmother" who appeared to
Kahlo throughout her life and gave her the choice of either living with
inescapable pain, due to childhood polio, a horrific bus accident,
miscarriages, and gangrene (all brutally depicted in perhaps her most famous
painting, "The Broken Column"), or dying and being at peace. This
music addresses the subtle but important difference between the choices we
actively make and the choices we're led to make, and how all these choices, for
better or worse, come to create our individual narratives. "To capture the
complexity of our life choices, Kahlo's struggles and my own personal
challenges, I've written layers of tension and resolution into the music and
tightly arranged certain sections, but I've also allowed for sections of
extended improvisation and possible spontaneous arranging within the
form," explained Aldana.
"These
compositions, and the rest of the music on Visions, deals with challenging
questions that bubbled up while I was immersed in Kahlo's paintings, as well as
researching her professional life and personal struggles - the latter of which
I feel connected to almost on an intuitive level. In these compositions I aim
to create different aesthetics and instrumental soundscapes that represent two
specific forces in Kahlo's life that have had a direct, evolving impact on the
direction of my music, as well as my own self-identity." - Melissa Aldana
Visions was
recorded by David Stoller on 9/14 & 9/15, 2018 at The Samurai Hotel
Recording Studio, Astoria, N.Y.
The album was
mixed and mastered by David Stoller at The Samurai Hotel
Cover art by
Cecile McLorin Salvant
Tour Dates
4/17: Traina
Cultural Center, Worchester, MA with Sam Harris, Kush Abadey and Pablo Menares
5/17:
Scullers, Boston, MA with the Visions Quartet
5/18: Side
Door, Old Lyme, CT with the Visions Quartet
5/20:
Dizzy's, New York, NY with Berklee Ensemble
5/21:
Clinic, Queens, NY with Berklee Ensemble
5/23-26:
Jazz Standard, New York, NY with Visions Quartet-CD rel celebration!
6/24-25:
Toronto Jazz Fest with Visions Quartet
6/26:
National Arts Centre, Ottawa, CAN with Visions Quartet
6/27:
Montreal Jazz Fest, Montreal, QC, CAN with Visions Quartet
6/28:
Edmonton Jazz Festival, Edmonton, AB, CAN with Visions Quartet
6/29:
Victoria Jazz Festival, Victoria, BC, CAN
6/30:
Vancouver Jazz Festival, Vancouver, BC, CAN
EU
7/5: Gexto
Jazz Fest, Gexto, Spain
7/6: Gent
Jazz Fest, Gent, Belgium
7/8: Pizza
Express, London, UK
7/9: Pizza
Express, London, UK
7/10 Roots
and Jazz at Balder Plads, Denmark
7/12: North
Sea Jazz Fest, Rotterdam, Netherlands
7/13:
Funchal Jazz Fest, Funcha,l Portugal
7/15: Duc
Des Lombards, Paris, France
7/16: Duc
Des Lombards, Paris, France
7/20: Hotel
Kras, Postojna, Slovenia with Jure Pukl's Doubtless
7/21:
Hungar, Izola, Slovenia with Jure Pukl's Doubtless
7/23: Arsana
Festival, Ptu,j Croatia with Jure Pukl's Doubtless
7/26: Cadiz
Jazz Festival, Cadiz, Spain with Jure Pukl's Doubtless
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