The duet project of tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana and bassist Linda May Han Oh makes an ideal case for how jazz has changed significantly over the last 30 years while still showing its perennial strengths. Beneath Lifted Skies presents two women instrumentalists (and neither is a pianist)—nearly unthinkable in, say, 1999—one born in Malaysia and raised in Western Australia, the other born in Chile, and both hugely acclaimed not just as players but as composers and bandleaders—radical, man.
The program, however, consists mostly of jazz standards written by the ancestors: John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Gigi Gryce, Herbie Hancock, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Sam Rivers, Wayne Shorter. Playing this music remains part of every jazz musician’s education. Beneath Lifted Skies makes clear that these new-century jazz musicians can hang on any level. They throw in one original and three freely improvised pieces to remind us that this is not your grand-daddy’s standards album.
Listen to Aldana and May Han Oh take Coltrane‘s “26-2” for a quick spin: they play the head in lockstep, then the bassist drops down to let the tenor improvise a bit. They effortlessly trade some phrases using Coltrane’s modification of the chord changes from Charlie Parker‘s “Confirmation”. Bebop, post-bop, they have it covered. Bud Powell’s “Hallucinations” is served by a moderate tempo, the pair again shifting between unison passages and walking groove. If you want faster bebop, “Anthropology” (Parker and Gillespie) is taken at a blistering tempo, with neither player breaking a sweat.
The two swingingest performances are on Thelonious Monk‘s “Introspection” and “Social Call” by Gigi Gryce. The Monk tune is Aldana’s best moment on Beneath Lifted Skies, with the saxophonist utterly at ease, taking a solo that flows languidly but isn’t afraid to shift into urgent double-time. The days of players making all-Monk albums may have passed, and the guitarist Miles Okazaki‘s recording every single Monk composition may have scared off younger players. Still, I’d love to hear Melissa Aldana make that album with her band.
May Han Oh and Aldana love the older standards, too. “I’ll Be Seeing You” gets a rich stroll at mid-tempo, with Aldana playing her horn a bit like Ben Webster—lots of air and deliciously bent notes. Mingus‘ tribute to his hero, “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love”, is slower and even more relaxed. Again, Aldana uses her tenor saxophone to mold each note. Sometimes she sounds like Webster, and sometimes she evokes the harder edge of George Adams (from Mingus’s last band). Modernity and tradition meet in the middle.
Three of the best composers of the 1960s in jazz get brilliant treatments. Wayne Shorter‘s mysterious waltz, “Dance Cadaverous”, is explored with notes wavering and slipping away from proper pitch. More modern still is “Cyclic Episode” by the saxophonist Sam Rivers, with the bass playing a range of patterns that shift from grooved octaves to snippets of traditional swing.
Then May Han Oh takes on “The Sorcerer” by Herbie Hancock by herself, playing melody, harmony, and rhythm unassisted and with a rich string tone. Just as impressive is her solo-bass version of “God Bless the Child”. She wrings all the pathos out of it and demonstrates how gorgeously the session was handled in the studio. Every bit of her bass sound is there, from fingers against the strings to how the strings sometimes clack against the fingerboard. Her original composition, “Winter”, is also a captivating track for bass alone.
One might imagine that the three improvised-from-scratch tracks might not fit into the flow of Beneath Lifted Skies. Because they are players of noted lyricism and empathy, however, May Han Oh and Aldana balance freedom and melodic consonance even when composing spontaneously. On each of “Infinite”, “Resolve”, and “Shoulder to Shoulder”, the musical partners are tuned-in and tonal.
The inclusion of spontaneous improvisations on a record mainly defined by jazz standards written between 1945-1965 also speaks volumes about the state of jazz today. Of course, many jazz musicians only play music that is “in the tradition”. Another group works exclusively “outside” the post-bop boundaries of tonality and written composition. However, most musicians at the forefront of the art are comfortable with either method. Indeed, the division that defined the “jazz wars” for decades—between tradition and some kind of “avant-garde”—seems quaint and wildly outdated in 2026.
Both Linda May Han Oh and Melissa Aldana grew up and were educated in a jazz world that pays equal homage to Louis Armstrong, Sonny Rollins, Archie Shepp, and Henry Threadgill. Their recent albums as leaders have mostly focused on their own integrations of tonal composition and improvisation with few limits, and this project simply pulls the two approaches apart slightly.
The result is an international duet album that freshly straddles a couple of eras, showing that the center of jazz in 2026 is pleasantly de-centered. Long may it remain so.