Dialogue at Wigmore Hall

For 50 minutes at Wigmore Hall last night, the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana delivered a lesson in how to take the finest material from the past and weave it into something that belongs firmly to the present. The Australian (born in Malaysia, of Chinese heritage) is the current answer to any question about which bassist you would choose to add energy and invention to your contemporary jazz group. The Chilean specialises in an unstoppable flow of creativity, her ideas developed with an unassuming virtuosity that places her at the forefront of the current generation of saxophonists. They were re-examining material from their new duo album, Beneath Lifted Skies, starting with Sam Rivers’ “Cyclic Episode”, which quickly revealed the nimbleness and intimacy of their musical partnership: lines were wrapped around each other in a constantly evolving double-helix. “I’ll Be Seeing You”, a standard rescued from a flop 1938 musical, enabled Aldana to display…

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