Bayside Melissa

Of What Remains is Montreal baritone saxophonist and bassoonist Melissa Pipe’s first release as a leader. It explores ideas around temporality: the shifting of time, form and being. The pieces form a whole, joining together fragmentation, symbiosis, distillation, evaporation, and transience, while looking at what is left behind, or what remains.

Melissa formed in Sydney in 1969 under the name Molten Hue. The original lineup was Robert Gunn (flute, vocals), Rick Barrett (guitar) Ken Frazier (bass) and Warren "Wal" Sparkes (drums), but Irish-born bassist Joe Creighton (who had previously been a member of UK band The A-Side) replaced Frazier not long after the band was formed. Melissa started out playing a psychedelia and acid-rock, and they were one of the first Australian bands to play rock in the style of American West Coast acts like Jefferson Airplance, Country Joe & The Fish or The Steve Miller Band.
The group's only album, Midnight Trampoline was recorded over a period of nine months during 1971 and was eventually released in October on the independent Banner label. Several tracks were composed by Creighton and/or Barnett, and there's an interesting arrangement of the traditional song "Cuckoo"…

12 Stars, the sixth album from formidable tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, is her first for Blue Note. It’s also the first to document a fruitful collaboration with Norwegian-born guitarist Lage Lund, who produced 12 Stars and cowrote the entire album with Aldana. The music is deeply informed by the harmonies and textures of Lund’s guitar and “gizmos,” at times sonically reminiscent of his 2019 album, Terrible Animals. Aldana, however, is the virtuosic focal point of 12 Stars as she mixes it up with a band featuring Lund with mainstay bassist and fellow Chilean Pablo Menares, pianist Sullivan Fortner, and drummer Kush Abadey. (The cover art, like that of Visions, is by the acclaimed vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant.) Complex unison parts, bristling tempos and transitions, rich tone colors, smoking solos, and an utterly bewitching ballad for a closing track—it’s work befitting one of the leading jazz artists of our time.