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Allan Chase Quartet

  • The Lilypad 1353 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA, 02139 (map)

$10 Cover @ the Door / Start 6:20pm / Doors 6pm / Seated Show

Allan Chase is a jazz saxophonist, composer, and college educator. He has performed jazz and improvised music since 1974 with his own groups and as a member of the Lewis Nash-Allan Chase Duo (1979-80), Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet (1981-present), Prima Materia with Rashied Ali (1992-2000), the Steve Lantner Quartet with Joe Morris and Luther Gray (2002-present), the Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra, the Bruno Råberg Quartet, Ra Kalam Bob Moses, and many other groups. He appears as a soloist on over fifty jazz and improvised music recordings, a few rock and classical recordings, and several movie scores. He has released two CDs as a leader, Dark Clouds with Silver Linings (with Ron Horton, Tony Scherr, and Matt Wilson) and Phoenix (with Ron Horton, Adam Kolker, David Finck, and Lewis Nash).

Chase currently teaches courses in harmony, jazz composition, jazz history, and ear training at Berklee College of Music and NEC. From 2008-21, Chase chaired the Ear Training department there and worked with the students of the Global Jazz Institute. He has taught a wide range of college courses in jazz history, transcription and analysis, ear training, harmony, counterpoint, music theory, jazz composition and arranging, ensembles, and private lessons in saxophone and improvisation.

He has taught at Berklee’s Valencia (Spain) Summer Performance Program in July of 2014-18, and was director of the Interlochen Summer Jazz program in 2019.

Allan Chase was born in Willimantic, Connecticut in 1956, grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in the Boston area since 1980, except for six years spent in Brooklyn, NY (1990-96).

He studied music theory and composition at Arizona State University (BM 1978) and ethnomusicology at Tufts University (MA 1992), where he wrote a book-length thesis on the music of Sun Ra. He also did graduate study in music theory and jazz at New England Conservatory (1980-81) and studied new music improvisation in two summer programs at the Creative Music Studio with Roscoe Mitchell, Karl Berger, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, Jerome Cooper, Leo Smith, and others (1978 and ‘79).

He began his teaching career at Berklee in 1981, and has also taught at Tufts University (1993-7) and New England Conservatory (1994- 2012), where he served as chair of jazz studies, chair of contemporary improvisation, and dean of faculty.

Allan Chase Quartet:

Allan Chase-saxophones,

Nate Radley-guitar,

Bruno Råberg-bass,

Gen Yoshimura-drums


New jazz compositions and rarely-heard songs and jazz tunes reimagined.

Earlier Event: January 20
Buttercup and Friends
Later Event: January 23
SiMoN (Japan) & Jesse Gallagher (solo)