Oh and Aldana’s Beneath Lifted Skies

Linda May Oh Han and Melissa Aldana join to lift us to the skies on their new album.

Linda May Oh Han gave Boise three spectacular sets just about a year ago. She and her band played largely from her “The Glass Hours” album, plus a few other songs. It was jazz that stretched you, and the interaction between vocalist Sara Serpa and saxophonist Greg Ward still floats around somewhere in my head.

Oh’s new album with saxophonist Melissa Aldana, “Beneath Lifted Skies,” is nothing like her sets in Boise. Here, she and Aldana mostly cover jazz classics—just the two of them, a bass and a sax. Their notes intertwine fluidly and leave you smiling at the sky above.

In their rendition of Bud Powell’s “Hallucinations,” Oh largely plays along with the melody, with a few sorties away, and then takes a bouncy solo. Aldana plays cleanly and sweetly, hitting some sultry lower notes at times. During Sam River’s “Cyclic Episode,” Aldana and Oh weave their notes in and out of fast runs that feel slow and mellow.

“Beneath Lifted Skies” came out August 21.

In closing, I’ll quote an Irving Berlin song that has become a jazz standard: “Blue skies, smilin' at me, Nothin' but blue skies do I see.”

And listening to this album will indeed disperse any of your gray skies and open you to blue, and lifted, skies.

Personnel
Linda May Han Oh – bass (https://lindamayhanoh.com/)
Melissa Aldana – tenor saxophone (https://www.melissaaldana.net/) (Aldana was in Boise in 2015 with her quartet.)

1) Anthropology
2) Hallucinations
3) Improvisation: Infinite
4) Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love
5) Cyclic Episode
6) The Sorcerer
7) Dance Cadaverous
8) 26-2
9) I’ll Be Seeing You
10) Social Call
11) Improvisation: Resolve
12) Introspection
13) God Bless the Child
14) Improvisation: Shoulder to Shoulder
15) Winter