Melissa Aldana is meeting her moment right now. At 33 years old, she’s already a quarter of a century into a musical trip that started in Santiago, Chile. Her father and grandfather were both jazz saxophone players in Chile, and she started early, at six years old, on the alto sax. She and her father would listen to Charlie Parker, and, as she tells it, try to understand the emotional content of the music.

When a few years later she heard the Sonny Rollins Plus Four record, that sound, that patient development of ideas, she knew that the tenor saxophone would be her instrument.

Maybe because Melissa’s own personal journey began so young, because she understood that jazz was in her family, or because she was drawn so naturally to that sound, Melissa never seemed to question her passion or her desire to devote her life to it. By the time she met the great pianist Danilo Perez, who came from Panama originally, and who was known to help other south American musicians, she was a confident, sociable, ambitious teenager with nothing to stop her. Danilo became an early champion of Melissa’s playing and helped her find a way to the States.

But really it was her own drive and belief in what she was doing that led her out of Chile. As she says, the motivation has never been external. She’s simply drawn to the music, to play, to practice as much as possible, to get in touch with the emotional intent. There must be something that feels so good about practicing saxophone because so many of the great sax players describe a kind of obsessive need to keep the horn in their mouth for hours and hours each day. And for Melissa, that is very real. She says she’s happiest when she can practice for at least five hours a day, in pursuit of an ideal that is ever changing, eternally illusive and unreachable. But it’s the pursuit itself that fuels the fire.

For Melissa, the pandemic brought personal turmoil, and she found herself broken, vulnerable, confronting what she describes as her “imperfections.” She says “Embracing everything I hear, everything I play — even mistakes — is more meaningful than perfection.”

Amidst all the Pandemic upheaval, she ended up turning not only to the technical aspects of her music but also the esoteric, the spiritual, and the cosmic. Numerology and therapeutic Tarot inspired the songs on her new record 12 Stars on Blue Note records. She says the record describes her journey through the pandemic. It grapples with concepts of child rearing, familial forgiveness, acceptance, and self-love.

The album was produced by guitarist Lage Lund, who has also been a guest of this show, and engineered by James Farber, another former guest.

Finding inspiration in unexpected places is not new for Melissa. Her last record, Visions, was inspired by the work of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. And, considering both Aldana and Kahlo are among only a small handful of Latin American females who thrived in a largely male dominated world, one might assume that was the tie that binds them. And Melissa was a member of Artemis, an all female supergroup created by pianist Renee Rosnes.

But to Melissa, the “gender thing” as she calls it, has really been secondary all along.

She recognizes that she is a role model but she’s unburdened by it, and, given the choice, seems like she would rather just be about the music and not all the identity questions. For Melissa, as she says repeatedly, the focus is on sound, time and ideas. Sound, time and ideas.

Melissa was as generous in conversation as she is on stage. She prepared an outrageous cheese board for us to enjoy while we talked, and at one point she walked to the kitchen and returned with homemade guacamole.

We spoke recently about growing up in Chile, her journey to America, practicing, teaching, numerology, playing the blues, “the gender thing”, learning to embrace imperfection, her new record “12 Stars”, her idea of success, and what she values most in music: sound, time and ideas.

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217: Melissa Aldana