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 has released four CDs as a leader, each with a regularly performing band. The most recent is "Dada Bebop", which explores experimental possibilities of the bebop tradition while incorporating the influence of 1910s-20s Dada sound poetry. "City Of Birds, Volume I", his third CD, is the first installment of a collection of compositions inspired by every species of bird native to New York City; it features a quartet named All The Birds. More volumes of this series are coming soon. Elijah's second CD, "Star Jelly", which came out in February 2023, features an expanded lineup of the Star Jelly Horns: an eclectic, sax-heavy version of a New Orleans-style "brass" band which grew out of busking in Prospect Park in 2020. Elijah also leads the Robber Crabs, a quartet combining the influences of early jazz and avant-garde jazz; with this group he recorded his debut CD "Unhinged", released in April 2018. Elijah won an ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award with the title track from this album. "Dada Bebop", "City Of Birds, Vol. 1", and "Star Jelly" were recorded at the historic Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and released on Elijah's 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 guitarist Christian Cail's Stress Assembly quartet and violinist Ben Sutin’s Klazz-Ma-Tazz; Elijah is on both of the latter’s CDs. 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 composed for the chamber ensembles Du.0 and Xelana Duo, and arranged for Dandy Wellington And His Band and the Evan Sherman Big Band.

 

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 former member of the Linnaean Society of New York and the Brooklyn Bird Club, Elijah got to perform some of his compositions for the former's lecture series at the American Museum of Natural History in November 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.