The album brings together bassist Linda May Han Oh and tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana in a duo setting. It’s quite “simple” and unadorned in approach – but there is complexity in the simplicity. Ultimately I gravitated as much towards the originals as luxuriating in the familiarity of the standards.
Both musicians bring substantial experience to the meeting. Malaysia born, Australia raised Oh, 42, has worked with Pat Metheny, Kenny Barron, Joe Lovano, Terri Lyne Carrington, Vijay Iyer, Geri Allen and Dave Douglas. Her own recording career has included Sun Pictures, Walk Against Wind, Aventurine, The Glass Hours and the more recent Strange Heavens, made with Tyshawn Sorey and Ambrose Akinmusire. She has also been recognised with awards including the Herb Alpert Award and Deutscher Jazz Preis, and is a Grammy Award winner.
Chile born Aldana, 37, came up through the Santiago jazz scene before moving to the US to study at Berklee. In 2013, aged 24, she became the first female instrumentalist and first South American to win the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition. Her 2019 album Visions brought a Grammy nomination, and she was a founding member of the Blue Note all-star collective Artemis although is no longer in the band. Her subsequent Blue Note albums have included 12 Stars and Echoes of the Inner Prophet. Her most recent album, Filin, was reviewed by Marlbank in February.
Beneath Lifted Skies was produced by Oh and recorded over two days in February at studios in Acton, Massachusetts, a historic New England town around 25 miles northwest of Boston and close to Concord.
As to repertoire on this quietly released album issued in August, the tunes draw a line through several generations of jazz. It opens with ‘Anthropology’, the Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie bebop classic built on the chord changes of George Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’, followed by Bud Powell’s ‘Hallucinations’ also known as ‘Budo’ when Miles Davis played it. ‘Infinite’, credited to Oh and Aldana, is an improvised piece in the sense of spontaneous composition. Also here is Charles Mingus’ Changes One classic ‘Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love’, Mingus’s 1975 released tribute to Ellington who died in 1974 a matter of months before that album was recording.
Sam Rivers’ ‘Cyclic Episode’, from his 1965 album Fuchsia Swing Song, points towards the freer and more harmonically mobile jazz of the 1960s. Walter Smith III covered the piece on his album Casually Introducing Walter Smith III 20 years ago – Aldana shares something in common with Smith although when I hear her sound I usually think most of Joshua Redman.
Herbie Hancock’s ‘The Sorcerer’, associated with Miles Davis’s 1967 album of the same name, and Wayne Shorter’s ‘Dance Cadaverous’, first recorded during the sessions for Speak No Evil, continue that post-bop thread.
John Coltrane’s ‘26-2’, based on the changes of Charlie Parker’s ‘Confirmation’, takes bebop material into more advanced harmonic territory.
A transcription of the 2012 Aldana version of ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’
The older popular-song tradition is represented by ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’, written by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal for the 1938 Broadway musical Right This Way.
Aldana has already recorded the great song on her earlier 2012 album Second Cycle which is hard to find. ‘Social Call’, by Gigi Gryce, brings in a bluesier 1950s jazz sensibility.
Maybe there are too many tunes. The thought crossed my mind! Thelonious Monk’s ‘Introspection’ and ‘God Bless the Child’ are here, and another Oh and Aldana tune, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’, is also included. ‘Winter’, credited to Oh, closes the album.
I liked it well enough overall but was frustrated by the small-scale setting. I found myself trying to imagine hearing the duo live and how I would feel about that as a full concert. As one half of a concert it would be better and probably highly stimulating, but a full one? You need a bigger band to flesh all this out.
Some of these tunes are so familiar you feel you have heard them a million times but somehow, in the main, the duo manage to keep them interesting.
The tune I return to most? That is Oh’s ‘Winter’. I thought of Charlie Haden a few times when thinking of Oh’s sound and especially here. I’ll be listening to Beyond the Missouri Sky – Haden’s glorious album with Pat Metheny (with whom Oh has worked extensively) again this morning. It is perhaps telling that the piece that stays with me is an original composition. The duo display the knack of being faithful to very old material but inserting their own originality and freshness so naturally.
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