Elijah Shiffer

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Elijah Shiffer is a New York-based musician who has been involved with nearly every facet of the city’s jazz scene as a saxophonist, bandleader, composer, arranger, editor, and critic. He currently leads three regularly performing bands, all of them quartets, and has released albums of each one. His most recent album is “City Of Birds, Volume 3”, the third of hopefully many installments in a collection of compositions inspired by every species of bird native to New York City. His previous album, "Dada Bebop”, features the Dada Bebop Quartet, in which he explores experimental possibilities of the bebop tradition while incorporating the influence of 1910s-20s Dada sound poetry. The third quartet is the Robber Crabs, which combines the influences of early jazz and avant-garde jazz; with this group he recorded his debut album "Unhinged", released in April 2018. Elijah won an ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award with the title track from this album. From 2020 to 2023, Elijah also led the Star Jelly Horns, an eclectic, sax-heavy version of a New Orleans-style "brass" band, and recorded an album titled “Star Jelly”. Starting in 2021, Elijah has been making these recordings at the historic Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, releasing them on his own label also called Star Jelly.

Elijah is a regular member of the Shrine Big Band, which has a monthly residency at The Shrine in Harlem. He also currently plays in singer-songwriter Grant Braider’s quartet and violinist Ben Sutin’s band Klazz-Ma-Tazz; Elijah is on recordings by both groups. Other leaders Elijah has played with include Xander Naylor (with whom he’s recorded and toured), Tyshawn Sorey, Sean Cronin, Cecilia Coleman, Bobby Sanabria, Kyle Athayde, and Nicolas Letman-Burtinovic. Besides countless jazz venues around NYC, Elijah has performed in a variety of other spaces including City Reliquary, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and MoMA PS1. In October 2024, he performed some of his City Of Birds music at the American Ornithological Society conference in Estes Park, Colorado.

From 2016 to 2019, Elijah was a member of the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop. In February 2020, he premiered four big band compositions in a Jazz Composers Showcase concert at the Jazz Gallery. Elijah created an improvised solo sax soundtrack for "Always For The First Time", a short film by John Caliendo and Victoria Meade that won Best Experimental Short Film at the 2022 Tallahassee Film Festival. Elijah has arranged for Dandy Wellington And His Band and the Evan Sherman Big Band, and composed for classical ensembles including the New York City Brass Choir and the violin duo Du.0.

Elijah Shiffer: Star Jelly

Read "Star Jelly" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
October 23, 2023

Sometimes very talented people write difficult music. The music is difficult because its intent is not immediately clear. Or it does not follow canonical criteria, at least as currently understood. Music history presents us with many examples: Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich--these are only very famous “classical" composers whose work passed from controversial to acceptable to mainstream. In jazz, one thinks of Ornette Coleman or someone probably considerably less orthodox and perhaps much less well known.