Melissa Aldana

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1988, Melissa Aldana grew up in a jazz-rich environment and began playing saxophone at an early age before adopting the tenor sax, the instrument that has been central to her musical voice since adolescence. Trained at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and later based in New York, Aldana developed a style rooted in modern jazz—between hard bop, post-bop and contemporary writing—characterized by a dense tone, flexible articulation and a strong attention to melodic lines. She released Free Fall in 2010 and Second Cycle in 2012, and gained wider recognition with the Crash Trio, a group without a harmonic instrument that highlights a more open dialogue between saxophone, double bass and drums, notably on Melissa Aldana & Crash Trio (2014) and Back Home (2016). In 2013, Melissa Aldana became the first woman and the first South American musician to win the Thelonious Monk saxophone competition, an important milestone in her career. She later refined a more personal compositional voice with Visions (2019), followed by 12 Stars (2022) and Echoes of the Inner Prophet (2024), two albums released on Blue Note. She is also a member of Artemis, a female jazz collective formed around musicians from the New York scene.