Last summer at the Rochester International Jazz Festival, alto saxophonist Alexa Tarantino went riff-to-riff with Wynton Marsalis, the famed trumpet player and founding artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC). In a smaller septet arrangement of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s (JLCO) sold-out performance in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, Tarantino seized the trumpet player’s crafted licks, reformulated them, and blew them back. Only 33, her playing was lively and astute, yet coolly confident.
When the full JLCO ensemble joined for the concert’s second half, Tarantino’s presence was unmistakable. Front and center in the saxophone section of a 15-piece jazz band, Tarantino was the only woman on the stage.
An Eastman School of Music alumna, Tarantino was completing her first year as JLCO’s first-ever full-time female member. She returns to the festival on Saturday in Kilbourn Hall for two sets (6 p.m. and 9 p.m.), but this time leading her quartet and playing works from her latest album, The Roar and the Whisper, released last July on JALC’s Blue Engine Records. More than a chance to hear Tarantino lead, it’s a return to the jazz festival by a player whose trajectory from student to the country’s premier jazz ensemble has been glimpsed in snapshots from her festival performances.
The first snapshot, however, wasn’t planned.
While at Eastman, Tarantino received a scholarship supported by a benefit concert performed by one of the most successful bands in history, Earth, Wind & Fire. When the band was booked to play Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre for the 2014 Rochester jazz festival—the summer after Tarantino’s spring graduation from Eastman—the scholarship organizer (the Belasco family) gave her a tip that the band’s distinctive vocalist, Philip Bailey, was sitting in Java’s Café on Gibbs Street. So, she went to say thanks for the support. She left Java’s, however, with instructions to show up at soundcheck and an invitation to sit in with the band that night.
“He could’ve just had me stand in the horn section playing their horn lines,” she recalled. “Instead, he just totally carved out a whole portion of his set. Which, if I’m coming to see an Earth, Wind & Fire concert, I don’t expect to hear.”
It was the first—but not last—sold-out concert she would play at Kodak Hall.
The path to last year’s performance in Kodak Hall with JLCO, however, began even earlier. While a high school student in CT, Tarantino’s first encounter with the institution was through the annual Essentially Ellington competition, where talented high school jazz ensembles compete for honors and participate in workshops at the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Columbus Circle home in Manhattan. It was the event where Tarantino says she caught the bug to do jazz professionally.
She remembers thinking, “There’s this institution around playing big band music and, especially, Duke Ellington’s music. It was just like, ‘wow, I found my people.’”
She kept finding her people after graduating from Eastman. Her first professional gig was with the DIVA Jazz Orchestra, the all-female jazz ensemble led by drummer Sherrie Maricle. Tarantino remembers driving down to the Poconos, after her impromptu post-graduation jazz festival appearance, for a gig-turned-audition.
And it led her to New York City, where Tarantino pursued a master’s degree in the Juilliard School’s jazz program, which was founded in 2001 by none other than JALC’s Wynton Marsalis. At Juilliard, Tarantino worked with JLCO’s section saxophone players like Ted Nash and Sherman Irby, whom she had met at Essentially Ellington in high school.
Through those closer Lincoln Center connections, Tarantino was also recruited to teach in JALC’s educational programs. Another teaching artist, baritone saxophonist Lauren Sevian, was a former teacher at a jazz camp Tarantino attended and had been a member of the DIVA orchestra. Sevian and Tarantino joined forces to form the LSAT quintet, a name derived from their collective initials. In a ‘it’s a small world’ coincidence, Sevian’s husband was a behind-the-scenes organizer with the Rochester International Jazz Festival, connecting Tarantino back to where she began.
In 2017, Tarantino was invited back to the festival with LSAT, a second snapshot of her rising artistry.
Tarantino also joined the band Artemis, another all-star all-female ensemble. But she wasn’t available for Artemis’s appearance at the 2024 Rochester International Jazz Festival. By that point, she was subbing regularly with JLCO and gravitating away from other gigs.
It’s one thing to sit in with JLCO, and she’s not the first woman to do so. Tarantino is careful to name the women who came before her, such as trombonist Jen Krupa, pianist Helen Sung, trumpet player Tanya Darby, and saxophonist Camille Thurman. It’s another thing to land a full-time spot. Tarantino says that chairs at JLCO can be occupied for a performer’s entire professional career, with turnover happening only every 25–35 years.
“Through the subbing, it became more of a mentorship with Wynton, Sherman, and Ted Nash,” she recalls. “And when Ted Nash decided he wanted to retire after 30 years in Wynton’s groups, he passed the torch to me.”
She started as the saxophone section was in transition. When she began subbing, she was playing with most of the ensembles’ original members, including Victor Goines, Walter Blanding, and Paul Nedzella. Now, the ensemble includes Chris Lewis and Abdias Armenteros, saxophonists who took over for Goines and Blanding, respectively.
“To step into the next generation of the band together has been really amazing,” says Tarantino. “And to put our own spice on things, in terms of the vibe of the band, the sense of humor, the jokes, the routines. You come up with your own flow. I couldn’t ask for a better gig and better peers, better fam.”
The JLCO family will change yet again following this next season: It’s Marsalis’s final season as artistic director. A successor has yet to be named. But the next season is devoted to celebrating Marsalis’s contributions in building JALC’s legacy since its official start in 1991.
As for being the lone woman within an all-male band and Tarantino’s status as the ensemble’s first full-time female member, she says it all comes down to the music. “All those moments of adversity I’ve had, I’ve just tried to put my head down and do the work. It’s all going to come out on the bandstand. No one can argue with how you play.”
She continued, “When people see me walk on the stage, they can see how I identify, they can see that I’m a woman in the band. And that should be it. It exists, it’s happening, and hopefully it continues.”
That statement of belonging is ever stronger with her latest album, The Roar and the Whisper, which will feature in her jazz festival shows on Saturday. The band includes Philip Norris on bass, Mark Whitfield, Jr. on drums, and her husband Steven Feifke on piano. On the album’s title track, Tarantino juxtaposes roars and whispers on her horn, in a moseying, almost freeform appeal.
Festival co-director John Nugent says that while Rochester may know Tarantino well by now, as an Eastman alum, “the industry doesn’t know her as well as they should.” He calls Tarantino a “fabulous young player,” with several sources informing her sound. “But that’s the beauty of jazz, you take all the different styles and turn them into your own. She can swing hard, she can groove, she can play originally.”
That ability to synthesize several styles is apparent on the next track of her album, a punchy, cosmopolitan version of the minor mode Wayne Shorter tune “This is For Albert.” Her versatility continues with the ballad “Luminance,” where she demonstrates tuneful ease and a warm tone on the alto flute.
Tarantino also doubles on flute with JLCO. It’s a skill she honed while playing with the intensely communicative vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, who engaged Tarantino originally for her flute, not sax, skills. Their musical friendship is spotlighted on Tarantino’s album in an atmospheric voice-and-flute duet called “Moon Song.”
Salvant is also performing at the jazz festival this year, a club pass show in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre on Wednesday, June 24 at 7 p.m. (Those without club passes can buy tickets with cash at the door.) Tarantino was previously unaware Salvant would also be at the festival. She says there are no plans for Salvant to sing with her quartet—at least not yet. But she encourages people to go. “[Cécile’s] amazing, so inspiring, so creative, every night is different,” says Tarantino. “She’s truly just her own.”
It has been 12 years since Tarantino graduated from Eastman and made a guest appearance with Earth, Wind & Fire on the Kodak Hall stage. When she considers what it felt like to return to that same stage last year with JLCO, all she can say is, “Whoa, that was awesome.”
The next season will be a busy one—JLCO maintains a hectic, globetrotting schedule, which will be even more intense as they head toward Marsalis’s exit. But for now, she says, “I just want to enjoy this ride with Wynton and the band and continue pushing and growing and playing and traveling. It’s a beautiful ride.”
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Featured photograph: JLCO 2025 Africa Tour. Gilberto Tadday/Jazz at Lincoln Center.
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Be sure to catch Rochester Overture’s coverage of the Rochester International Jazz Festival, starting this Friday, June 19. Check out our Field Notes for show reviews, join our newsletter for coverage updates, and click on the social icons at the top for on-the-street updates.
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