The tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana was the first South American (as well as the first female instrumentalist) to win the highly rated Thelonious Monk International Jazz competition in 2013. Raised in Santiago in Chile, she received lessons from her father Marcos (who had also entered the same competition in the 1990s) and she absorbed the tradition from a young age, studying the language of the masters from swing and beyond. Instead of being distracted by jazz in its more contemporary forms she has stuck with it and digs deep here on a rewarding mainstream debut for the Concord label. With a sax-bass-drums trio, Sonny Rollins is perhaps the most immediately recognisable of her influences, and she confidently engineers seamless mood shifts and changes of rhythmic context with ease. But her more languid tone and expressive legato phrasing puts her closer to contemporary post-boppers such as Mark Turner – though she's a warmer, less detached model – and Joshua Redman. An assured presence belies her youth and inexperience. The rhythm section on a set of originals, aside from one standard ‘You're My Everything’, is made up of the bassist Pablo Menares, also from Chile, and her drummer Francisco Mela, from Cuba, who has impressed with his colourful percussive interventions with the bands of Joe Lovano and McCoy Tyner, and he makes a very telling contribution to this recording too. It's only her third album, but it has the mark of someone who's here to stay.