The first thing you notice about Aldana's playing is the weight of her tone. A lot of younger saxophone players go for brightness and speed, but she pulls sound from somewhere lower and heavier — closer to Sonny Rollins or Joe Henderson than to the lighter, more cutting approach you hear from a lot of her contemporaries. She studied with George Garzone in Boston and later with Gary Bartz in New York, and you can hear both of those influences somewhere in her playing, though she doesn't sound like either of them.

She won the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition in 2013, which put her name in front of a much wider audience almost overnight. Those competitions can be a double-edged thing — the attention is real but so is the pressure to immediately deliver something definitive — and for a year or two she was navigating what it meant to suddenly have expectations attached to her name. She handled it by doing the work and staying close to what she actually wanted to play.

Visions (2021) is the record that really crystallized what she's after as a composer. It's a concept album built around a graphic novel she co-created, which sounds like it could easily go wrong, but the music holds up completely on its own. The compositions are spacious and a little stark, and her rhythm section — Pablo Menares on bass and Kush Abadey on drums — locks in around her in a way that gives the whole record room to breathe. It doesn't rush to impress you.

Her Chilean background comes up in interviews, and it seems to matter to her in a real way rather than as a marketing angle. The music doesn't lean on Latin idioms in any obvious sense, but there's something in how she approaches melody and space that doesn't feel like it came purely from the New York school either. She's talked about growing up hearing her father play, and that early exposure to jazz as a family thing rather than a conservatory thing probably shaped how naturally she moves through the music.

If you're putting together a first listen, start with Visions (2021) and then go back to Back Home (2014) to hear where she was coming from earlier. The difference between those two records tells you a lot about how deliberately she's been developing. She's not trying to be the fastest or the most technically dazzling player in the room — she's trying to say something specific, and she's getting better at knowing exactly what that is.