For reasons that aren’t entirely clear (*) , it’s taken more than six months for “The Roar and the Whisper”, saxophonist/flautist Alexa Tarantino’s fifth album as leader, to get noticed. It was released digitally last July to mark the tenth anniversary of Blue Engine Records, the label of Jazz at Lincoln Center, but it first rose to be top of the (US) JazzWeek Jazz Chart in mid-February, and has kept hold of the No.1 spot ever since.
Morgan Enos interviewed Tarantino in February 2025 (link to interview below *) when the news had just broken that she had become the first ever female member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and she told Morgan about the album (although unable to disclose that Cecile McLorin Salvant would be on it):
“There are some grooves in there; I kind of just wanted to get up there, and swing — let it rip, honestly. Everybody brought their fire to it. It was a really great session, and I’m hoping that after a few years off from releasing my own records, that the audiences will enjoy it.”
And, as she has since commented, her aim was to evoke a “spectrum of moods”, and the album does that well. There is a contrast and a variety that makes it satisfying listening.
The difference between “The Roar…” and Tarantino’s previous albums for the Posi-Tone label is that the core trio this time is a cohort of friends of the same generation who have grown up knowing each other, and have a similar aesthetic, or as she has described it in an interview, “it becomes a family operation”. Pianist Steven Feifke is her husband. He brought drummer Mark Whitfield Jr. – the two have worked a lot together – and Philip Norris was a contemporary of Tarantino’s at Juilliard. Cecile McLorin Salvant, who also has a long history of working with Tarantino, comments that the session was a “warm reunion between old friends.”
That sense of a real ease of communication is there right from the first track they recorded to get settled in the studio, Wayne Shorter’s “This Is For Albert”. There is almost a default mood of can-do optimism, which shines through in “Provoking Luck” (video below), a title based on a personal mantra of the saxophonists which is not dissimilar to that golfing quote from the 60s of “the more I practice the luckier I get”.
I also enjoyed the clarity and wonderful soprano tone/impeccable tuning on her Yamaha on “Portrait of a Shadow”, which also has some delightful call-and-response with pianist Steven Feifke. and the sheer enjoyment of the glory of sostenuto sound of the alto flute on “Luminance”. Somewhat knottier is the title track, and there is a fascinating bar-by-bar deconstruction of Tarantino’s solo, focussing on the intervallic freedom in the January 2026 issue of Downbeat. I have been trying to make sense of what Wynton Marsalis’s description of Tarantino as “a one-woman wrecking crew,” might mean… From here, admittedly a long way away, she seems more of a builder than a wrecker – and that is the nearest explanation I can find.
She is certainly a fine doubler, playing no fewer than three instruments (alto, then soprano, then flute) on Strayhorn’s “Tigress” and a fourth (a gorgeous alto flute again) on the other Cecile McLorin Salvant song, the singer’s own “Moon Song”.
Tarantino has said that it was when she first saw and heard saxophonist Erica van Kleist playing that she told her parents that she wanted to take up the instrument. So maybe #IWD2026 serves as another “why now” excuse for publishing this review so late. Can one ever salute Alexa Tarantino enough as a salient and exemplary role model for Women in Jazz?
(*) It could have been the physical release of the CD