Hailey Niswanger - The Keeper (2012)

Hailey Niswanger was born in Houston, Texas, on February 12, 1990, and moved to Portland, Oregon, with her family when she was 2. She began studying classical piano at 5 and still plays the instrument, not in public, but for composing and “learning more about chords.” She took up clarinet at age 8 at Willowbrook Arts Camp outside Portland and years later, during summer breaks from Berklee, returned there to teach piano and woodwinds to children. Her clarinet teacher introduced her to saxophone when she was 10. She also played accordion for several years. By the time she was 16, she was taking private lessons on all four instruments and playing in at least nine different bands.

Even before she was out of her teens, while a freshman at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, saxophonist Hailey Niswanger (pronounced “NICE-wonger”) was turning heads with her stunning command of straight-ahead jazz traditions. One of those whose ears she caught with her 2009 debut recording, Confeddie, was the venerable jazz critic Nat Hentoff, who opined in the Wall Street Journal, “She plays with remarkable authority and drive considering her relative youth, and with the elan and dynamics of an unmistakable pro.”

Now 22 and living in Brooklyn, having graduated from Berklee in December 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in jazz performance, Niswanger demonstrates even greater virtuosity on her horns—alto and soprano saxophones—and deeper grounding in tradition with her second release, The Keeper, a set of eight of her own compositions, along with one apiece from the pens of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Cole Porter. She is joined by three masterly former Berklee associates—pianist Takeshi Ohbayashi, bassist Max Moran, and drummer Mark Whitfield Jr.—and, on three selections, trumpeter Darren Barrett, a Berklee alumnus who now teaches at the prestigious institution.