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 2”, the second 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.

 

Since early 2014, Elijah has been working for the jazz publishing company Second Floor Music. Besides editing their sheet music, Elijah writes descriptions of songs for the company's website, jazzleadsheets.com. His playing is featured on several videos on the jazzleadsheets.com YouTube channel. In 2022 Elijah started writing album reviews; these can be read in The New York City Jazz Record, jazzrightnow.com, and his own blog Extra Special Music.

 

Elijah is a graduate of Manhattan School Of Music, where he studied with Steve Wilson, Donny McCaslin, Jim McNeely, Dave Liebman, Samir Chatterjee, and Todd Reynolds. Earlier mentors of his include Ed Palermo and the late Barry Harris and Charles Davis.

 

Besides music, Elijah has always been very interested in birds. He can often be found birdwatching in NYC parks. A member of the Linnaean Society of New York, Elijah got to perform some of his compositions for their lecture series at the American Museum of Natural History in 2013. Since 2021, he has been leading birdwatching walks for the Lower East Side Ecology Center; he performed (with his All The Birds band) for this organization's annual Fall Social in 2021 and 2022. In 2023 he started Avant Birde, a birdwatching club focused on musicians (though non-musicians are certainly welcome). Elijah was featured on an episode of the podcast Your Bird Story in 2024, discussing both Avant Birde and the City Of Birds project.