The Manhattan-based Chile-born tenor saxophonist-composer Melissa Aldana’s star has been in the ascendant for about a decade now. In 2013 she won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone award; more recently she's hit a career high with last year’s Grammy-nominated Blue Note debut 12 Stars. Her engagingly probing, reflective brand of sax-jazz and thoughtfully crafted compositions have been evolving since the very promising Visions in 2019. So too her quintet formed in 2017 that seems to have a close chemistry and firm grasp of the material on her sophomore Blue Note release Echoes of the Inner Prophet. It boasts fellow Latin Americans: the Miami-raised Cuban pianist Fabian Almazan, who re-joins after missing 12 Stars, and compatriot Pablo Menares on bass, someone who she hooked up with originally on the Santiago jazz scene.

The haunting, ethereal qualities of 12 Stars continues apace on Echoes of the Inner Prophet with Aldana’s sax playing seeming to dig deeper into the interior recesses of herself. Tonal smears and slides inject blues and microtonal colours and searching, vocal-like phrases reference in particular the growing impact on her music of Wayne Shorter, the subject of the dedication on the title track.

Aldana knows how to tell a story, as does the wittily succinct guitarist Lage Lund (in charge of arranging and co-production) and the fresh-sounding, classical-influenced Almazan on piano who conjure an air of mystique around Aldana’s softly leaden, elegiac tones on the title track.

The enigmatic ‘Unconscious Whispers’ offers a new angle on what’s termed as ‘spiritual’ jazz and is a refreshing antidote to the current penchant for stylised regurgitations of the mid-1960’s ‘cosmic’ period. Echoes of the Inner Prophet is an album that succeeds in reinvigorating the jazz genre.