Taylor Eigsti and Melissa Aldana at UpSwing, Filling the Space Differently
At SFJAZZ’s UpSwing series, Taylor Eigsti and Melissa Aldana offered contrasting approaches in Miner Auditorium, revealing how structure and restraint shape contemporary jazz.
The UpSwing idea, as Terence Blanchard framed it in the series’ origin story, was not simply about putting young artists on a big stage. It was a corrective to a structural blind spot: the way major rooms can fail to build durable relationships with musicians already shaping the music’s present. The anecdote about Blanchard and Ben Wendel realizing—mid-airport—that Wendel had never properly played the SFJAZZ Center landed as more than institutional lore. It set the terms for last Saturday’s double bill at Miner Auditorium, where Taylor Eigsti and Melissa Aldana explored different ways of expanding their music without losing its intimacy.
Eigsti’s set leaned toward designed surfaces—grooves with clean edges, cue-point drama, and a sense of cinematic pacing that kept telling you where the downbeat should feel good. Aldana’s set treated the big hall like a close mic, building tension through restraint: air in the sound, time deliberately underlit, narratives advancing by implication rather than declaration.
Taylor Eigsti. Photo: Steve Roby
Eigsti opened with “Love for Sale,” using it as a chassis for a funk-informed pocket that was unmistakably public-facing. Jonathan Maron’s electric bass sat deep in the center of the beat, round and compressed, while drummer Oscar Seaton Jr. kept the backbeat taut, occasionally tightening his ride pattern into a straighter subdivision before letting it relax again. The arrangement’s hookiness mattered. The head arrived like a slogan and kept returning as a reference point, while Eigsti decorated the surface with bright, percussive right-hand figures. His use of the sustain pedal functioned as a film dissolve—enough to blur harmonic transitions, never enough to smear the groove.
On mic, Eigsti framed the set as a first: this was the debut of this particular quartet in Miner under his own name. He introduced guitarist Charles Altura with warmth. Altura responded by treating the electric guitar as a second narrator rather than a colorist.
“Tree Falls” pushed the set toward Eigsti’s central preoccupation—composition as designed space—but also revealed how design can momentarily constrain a band. For a few minutes, the music sounded as if it were negotiating its own choreography: entrances crisp, dynamics careful, the groove feeling placed rather than inhabited. The shift came when Maron widened his note lengths—less punctuation, more line—and the music began to breathe. The strongest passages followed, with Eigsti composing in real time through intervals: quick stabs of fourths and clustered seconds that served as structural beams, leaving Altura and Seaton room to animate the negative space.
The Taylor Eigsti Quartet. Photo: Steve Roby
The hinge arrived with “Somewhere,” delivered as a disarmingly direct statement after the earlier rhythmic insistence. Here, the pleasure principle had little to do with poignancy. Eigsti allowed cadences to land without commentary.
“Plot Armor,” the title track of Eigsti’s recent album, returned to his cinematic impulse. Even in quartet form, the approach was orchestral: thickened mid-register voicings, chord changes arriving like scene cuts, and narrative lift engineered through dynamics. Altura’s solo built with argument rather than flourish—tight rhythmic cells first, then longer phrases as he tested how far the harmony would let him lean.
Melissa Aldana. Photo: Steve Roby
After an intermission, Melissa Aldana reframed the evening in seconds. Opening with Hermeto Pascoal’s “Little Church,” she announced a different set of values. Her tenor sound carried a focused core, with fluttering edges that could fray on purpose. Physicality mattered. Knees bent into longer tones; tip-toed releases felt chosen rather than exhausted. Fingers barely lifted off the keys, keeping the horn’s mechanism quiet enough that attacks and releases registered as shape, not noise.
In our recent interview, Aldana spoke about “transcribing the frequency”—absorbing not just vocabulary but the emotional signature inside a single note, then doing the harder work of letting that influence dissolve. Onstage, that idea became audible in her relationship to space. Phrases ended with intention rather than momentum. She resisted the modern-tenor reflex to fill every barline. When density appeared, it often resolved into a single held pitch, complexity serving simplicity.
Her quartet—Glenn Zaleski on piano, Pablo Menares on acoustic bass, and Kush Abadey on drums—functioned like a living hinge around her. Zaleski’s solos were the set’s most overtly architectural statements, marked by clean voice-leading and left-hand placements that implied alternate bass motion without rewriting the tune. Abadey treated time elastically: dry snare comments, cymbal swells suggesting triplets without declaring them, and a steady hand that kept the band in a state of forward poise.
“Unconscious Whispers” arrived with inward pressure, dynamics, not tempo, carried the drama, crescendos rose like questions, then receded before answering.
Aldana ended with “Los Ojos de Chile,” offering a melody shaped by remembrance, intimate in tone and quietly declarative.
Taylor Eigsti and Melissa Aldana. Photo: Steve Roby
The encore brought Eigsti and Aldana together for a duet and quietly reconciled the evening’s opposing logics with “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” Not a grand finale, but a shared language test.
Program Notes
Event: Terence Blanchard's Upswing Series
Musicians: Melissa Aldana / Taylor Eigsti
Date: Saturday, January 17, 2026
Showtime: 7:30 p.m.
Venue: Miner Auditorium, San Francisco
Personnel
Taylor Eigsti Quartet: Taylor Eigsti (piano), Jonathan Maron (electric bass), Oscar Seaton Jr. (drums), Charles Altura (electric guitar).
Taylor Eigsti Quartet setlist: “Love For Sale,” “Let You Be,” “Tree Falls,” “Hutcheonite," “Somewhere,” “Plot Armor.”
Melissa Aldana Quartet: Melissa Aldana (tenor saxophone), Glenn Zaleski (piano), Kush Abadey (drums), Pablo Menares (acoustic bass).
Melissa Aldana Quartet setlist: "Little Church,” "Unconscious Whispers," “Lush Life,” “As Things Unfold,” “Los Ojos de Chile.”
Taylor Eigsti & Melissa Adana(encore): “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.”
Listen to our interview with Taylor Eigsti here.
Listen to our interview with Melissa Aldana here.
