Pacific Jazz Festival
Friday I March 3, 2023 I 7:30 pm
Faye Spanos Concert Hall
Pacific Jazz Ensemble
Patrick Langham, conductor
Melissa Aldana, tenor saxophone
Music selected from the following:
Windows (1966; 1978)
Walkin’ and Swingin’ (1936)
Full Nelson (1962)
Punjab (1964)
Overjoyed (1979; 1983)
Crystal Silence (1972; 1978)
Midnight Voyage (1996; 2009)
Chick Corea (1941–2021) arr. Mike Tomaro (b. 1958)
Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981)
Oliver Nelson (1932–1975)
Joe Henderson (1937–2001)
Stevie Wonder (b. 1954) arr. Mark Taylor
Chick Corea arr. Mike Tomaro
Joey Calderazzo (b. 1965) arr. Alan Baylock
Patrick Langham is an experienced educator and performer with a twenty-year career at the University of the Pacific. As professor and director of jazz studies, Langham has developed Pacific’s jazz studies degree programs from scratch. Langham is a cofounder of the Take Five Jazz Club in Stockton, and he regularly performs at the club and throughout the region. During his time at Pacific, Langham has traveled to Spain as a guest jazz conductor, overseen student performances in Paraguay, and directed groups at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Reno Jazz Festival, and Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. In 2023 Langham will direct the Pacific Jazz Ambassadors at two international jazz festival performances including Jazz in Marciac (France) and Jazzaldia (San Sebastian, Spain).
In 2017 Langham was awarded the California Music Educators Association Jazz Educator Award honoring excellence in jazz education and performance, and he is the past president of the California Alliance for Jazz. The University of the Pacific honored him with the Champion of Diversity Award in 2018. Langham holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees, both with a concentration in jazz studies, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. As a saxophonist, he has performed with many distinguished jazz artists including Lewis Nash, Bob Hurst, Donald Brown, Tom Harrell, Essiet Essiet, Terell Stafford, and Louis Hayes.
Born in Santiago, Chile, Melissa Aldana grew up in a musical family. Both her father and grandfather were saxophonists, and she took up the instrument at age six under her father Marcos’s tutelage. Aldana began on alto, influenced by artists such as Charlie Parker and Cannonball Adderley, but switched to tenor upon first hearing the music of Sonny Rollins, who would become a hero and mentor. She performed in Santiago jazz clubs in her early teens and was invited by pianist Danilo Pérez to play at the Panama Jazz Festival in 2005.
Aldana moved to the United States to attend the Berklee College of Music, and the year after graduation she released her first album, Free Fall, on Greg Osby’s Inner Circle label in 2010, followed by Second Cycle in 2012. In 2013, at twenty-four, she became the first female instrumentalist and the first South American musician to win the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition, in which her father had been a semifinalist in 1991. After her
