Home > Jazz / Blues

02/26/2025

PSU Jazz Band with Melissa Aldana: March 4th, 2025, 7pm, The Old Church PSU Jazz Band with Melissa Aldana / Preview

By MICHAEL SHOEHORN CONLEY // Melissa Aldana, a native of Chile, has been making a name for herself as one of the great saxophonists in today’s jazz world. She was recently named Downbeat magazine’s “Rising Star Artist of the Year.” She will perform Tuesday, March 4th with the PSU Jazz Band under the direction of George Colligan in downtown Portland.

Melissa Aldana, a native of Chile, has been making a name for herself as one of the great saxophonists in today’s jazz world. She was recently named Downbeat magazine’s “Rising Star Artist of the Year.” She will perform Tuesday, March 4th with the PSU Jazz Band under the direction of George Colligan in downtown Portland

I have been attending concerts by the jazz band at PSU for years now, seeing a host of great players, including alto saxophonists Steve Wilson, Miguel Zenon, and Paquito D’Rivera; vocalist Johnaye Kendrick; vocalist/saxophonist Camille Thurman– and others, almost all of whom I reviewed on this site.

Having seen Aldana’s name in the jazz press for several years, I wondered what she sounds like. I know I could have immediately typed her name into a search engine, but I was reading a magazine! For listening, I rely on the radio more than the internet, and I heard a really creative number she did on KMHD 89.9fm recently and liked what I heard.

Aldana has 71.5K followers on her instagram account melissaadldanasax. Along with the videos she posts of herself playing high-octane transcriptions, or her recent activities with a who’s-who of the NYC jazz scene, there is a charming video of her at age twelve playing a Stevie Wonder medley on alto sax on a concert stage. The clip looks like it was made for a TV show in Latin America, and she sounds great.

At that tender age, she already had a fundamental integrity to her sound, and some hallmarks of her current style– intense concentration on the playing, eyes sometimes cast over the horizon, sometimes closed with focus on the art. Aldana plays with great skill and musicality but is not a flashy presence onstage. 

Local audiences can experience even more connection with artists when topnotch soloists such as Aldana come to town and perform with our city’s university students and professors. You may hear these folks play in smaller groupings in our local clubs and at other events, but it’s great to see professor George Colligan put these players through their paces for a once-in-a-lifetime concert, usually spotlighting arrangements by Colligan himself, other faculty, and PSU students as well.

I am looking forward to learning more about this artist and her work at the concert. Find her here.

Comments