Melissa Aldana and Crash Trio (Concord)

HER grandfather Enrique Aldana was one of Chile’s pioneer tenor saxophonist virtuosi and she inherited his instrument at the age of 16.Her father Marcos Aldana became a renowned jazz saxophonist at the Club de Jazz de Santiago.

And now his daughter Melissa, under his tutelage, has become her country’s most celebrated jazz expert, having been introduced to the Berklee College of Music by the Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez, and won the Thelonius Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 2013 — the first South American and the first woman ever to do so.

After her prodigious teenage years leading bands and sessions in her home city, the leap to the US jazz scene was a formidable challenge.

But her friendships with the great tenorist George Coleman and the contemporary altoist Greg Osby helped her through her introductory years and she was soon performing around the New York jazz scene with masters like Christian McBride, Kevin Hayes and Jeff “Tain” Watts, as well as recording two albums for Osby’s label Inner Circle Music.

By 2014 she had cut her first album with her Crash Trio, with Chilean bassist Pablo Menares and the drummer from Bayamo, Cuba, Francisco Mela, both musicians being powerful composers as well as masters of their instruments.

But it is Aldana’s compositional skills that open the album with M and M, which perhaps refers to her bandmates.

Certainly Crash is a trio of equal compadres and not a star horn plus two accompanists and that is clear from the off, where Menares and Mela establish a scintillating stop-time rhythmic propulsion and Melissa’s notes weave and twine around their sound with a sense of lightness and buoyancy that is almost like levitation.

Aldana also wrote the virtually quiescent Turning, with Menares’s pulsating beat close to the earth and Mela’s butterfly drums and cymbals sprinkling his bandmates with a dappled sound.

Aldana travels low on her horn and then ascends in steps, showing the artistry which so impressed the judges of the Monk prize — saxophonists as eminent as Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Heath, Bobby Watson and Branford Marsalis, not exactly a mediocre bunch.

Melissa shows that she is no mean balladeer on the songbook standard You’re My Everything. Her unaccompanied opening gives no guess of the melody, which comes like a gradual revelation.

M and M come in as she begins this narrative and, as she continues, her light sounds and occasional serpentine turns remind me a little of another tenorist who grew up within a Latin musical context and turned to jazz, the Cape Verde-born Ellingtonian, Paul Gonsalves. Yet as her reedsong begins to skip and dance through the jubilant Bring Him Home, with Mela’s rustling drums and Menares’s bass hopping beneath her, it is as if her sound and its quasi-weightlessness is like no other.

A solo Menares begins his own composition Tirapie, full of polyrhythmic delight.

Mela enters on bongos and Melissa narrates the theme as if she were telling a children’s story.

Peace, Love and Music by Mela begins with a drums charge straight from Havana before Melissa’s ascendant notes come singing in, anchored by Menares’s plunging basslines.

Menares played at jazz festivals and venues all over South America before he moved to New York in 2009, and there is more evidence of his artistry in the trio’s performance of his tune Perdon. His bass, sometimes almost subterranean, is everywhere.

Melissa’s featherweight tenor wanders through her own piece, New Points, playing over the rhythmic breaks and changes like a veteran.

As for Mela’s tune, Dear Joe, it has a strong Caribbean and calypso lilt and is the kind of theme Sonny Rollins — one of Melissa’s girlhood heroes whose joyous sound caused her to change from alto to tenor sax — loved to play to listeners all over the world. She plays it like his sonic shadow.

Perhaps it is fitting that the album’s last track is Melissa’s solo rendition of Monk’s Ask Me Now, all the way up to the great pianist’s home city from the cone of South America.How he would have nourished and loved its beauty in Chilean breath — as we, lucky listeners, can.