Jazz Articles about Roddy Ellias

About Roddy Ellias

Album Review

While a somewhat common secondary instrument for primarily electric guitarists including Vic Juris, Pat Metheny and Adam Rogers, there are but a handful of jazz six-stringers alive today who make the nylon-string acoustic guitar their main axe. Despite being known to pick up a warm-toned hollow body electric guitar when the need arises, Ottawa, Canada-based Roddy Ellias is, like the better-known Ralph Towner, a guitarist who has made its gentler acoustic cousin, played with fingers rather than plectrum, his primary ...

Album Review

Roddy Ellias Trio: Monday's Dream

Read "Monday's Dream" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
April 14, 2014

Since returning home to Ottawa after spending much of his adult life as an associate music professor at Concordia University in Montréal, Roddy Ellias may have retired but he's far from slowing down. Retirement's just a word, but for this extraordinary guitarist it's clearly been a liberating one; based on Monday's Dream, his first recording since returning to Ottawa, it's suiting him very, very well, indeed. While he still plays a hollow body electric guitar on occasion, Ellias' ...