Melissa Aldana Quartet at Wave Hill

Melissa Aldana
Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center
Sunset Wednesday
New York NY
July 15, 2026 

Wildfire smoke from Canada choked New York City last Wednesday night, including at Wave Hill, the garden and cultural center located north of Manhattan, which customarily offers outdoor shows with spectacular views of the Hudson River and New Jersey Palisades. Given the grimy air, the venue had little choice but to move its scheduled "Sunset Wednesday" performance by tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana indoors.

Fortunately, Armor Hall, the 1910 performance space at the sprawling estate—which has been home to such luminaries as Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain—offers a setting as exquisite as Wave Hill's west-facing lawn, which usually hosts its concerts. Aldana and company played a graceful set in front of tall cathedral windows with views of the property's towering elms and oaks, and under the room's ornate vaulted, wood ceiling.

Although fresh from releasing Filin (Blue Note Records, 2026), a Cuban-flavored ballads album, Aldana played a more varied program at Wave Hill, drawing on her deep roots in post-bop jazz.

Her playing was, customarily, unhurried and deeply melodic. Though a brilliant technician, Aldana is a player built more for emotional depth and expression than for speed and flashiness. She began the set's sole ballad with a near-three-minute unaccompanied solo, gently fluttering and beautifully modulated, before the band joined her and she unfurled the evening's most thoughtful and gorgeous solo.

Even before Filin, which features Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Aldana has more favored quartets that feature pianists than guitarists, especially in her recordings. Her chording partner at Wave Hill, though, was her intermittent live collaborator, guitarist Mike Moreno. While the two haven't played together in a while, as Aldana reported in a brief chat after the set, their musical chemistry seemed anything but rusty.

During the Moreno original that opened the set, Aldana navigated the twisty theme with the guitarist providing seamless support, occasionally in unison with her and often with empathetic chordal support. Playing a semi-hollow-body electric guitar, Moreno's warm tone meshed pleasingly with Aldana's throughout the hour-long performance, and his harmonic affinities—rooted in such post-bop icons as Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter—matched those of the leader, as well.

The sure-footed rhythm section comprised two other New York-based expatriates: bassist Pablo Menares, a frequent Aldana collaborator who shares her Chilean heritage, and Jochen Rueckert, the German drummer whose impressive resume includes—relevant to this performance—a lot of work with guitarists, including Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie and Lage Lund. 

The only drawback to moving the performance indoors was to enclose in a formal setting some of its younger attendees, who could have roamed freely outdoors in the concerts' usual family-picnic setting. Yet even the occasional chatter of young voices, and clatter of young feet, didn't diminish the pleasure of a unique set of very urban music in the unlikely location of a charming country estate.