An adept tenor saxophonist whose personal voice in contemporary improvised music blends incisive harmonic choices, unconventional phrasing, and melodic openness, Ellery Eskelin draws from Dexter Gordon’s romantic stance, Ornette Coleman’s exploratory free-jazz language, and the motivic focus of David Liebman, with whom he later studied. Long tied to the Knitting Factory milieu in New York, Eskelin first drew notice during the 1980s as a sideman with organist Jack McDuff and later stepped forward as a bandleader. Under his own name he has issued numerous exploratory, sonically rich recordings, among them Forms in 1990 and Quiet Music in 2006. He has sustained an ongoing trio with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black, documented on Kulak, 29 & 30 in 1998 and Arcanum Moderne in 2003, while additional projects have paired him with Drew Gress, Mark Dresser, Erik Friedlander, and others; further collaborations include the 2012 Liebman encounter Non Sequiturs and the 2017–2019 trio dates Sensations of Tone and Pearls with bassist Christian Weber and drummer Michael Griener.
Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1959, Eskelin spent his formative years in Baltimore, Maryland, alongside his mother Bobbie Lee, the Hammond B-3 specialist who directed her own jazz ensembles throughout the 1960s. His father, whom he never knew, was the cult song-poem artist Rodd Keith. Eskelin took up the tenor saxophone at age ten and promptly began absorbing jazz; while still in high school he worked professionally, aided by the annual week-long Stan Kenton & His Orchestra summer workshops he attended at Towson State University. After graduation he enrolled at Towson, then relocated to New York City in 1983, where he pursued lessons with saxophonist David Liebman. His first appearance on record came with the 1987 quartet album Joint Venture, featuring trumpeter Paul Smoker, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Phil Haynes; the following year the same rhythm section, minus Smoker, reconvened for Setting the Standard.
In 1990 Eskelin reunited with Gress and Haynes for Forms, then joined tuba player Joseph Daley and percussionist Arto Tuncboyaciyan on Figure of Speech. The unaccompanied saxophone recital Premonition appeared on Prime Source in 1993. Around that time he assembled the trio with keyboardist-accordionist Andrea Parkins and drummer Jim Black, whose first release, Jazz Trash, surfaced in 1994. Eskelin and Parkins also recorded the 1997 duo set Green Bermudas, after which the full trio returned for One Great Day… later that year and Kulak, 29 & 30 in 1998.
Independently, Eskelin assembled an array of ensembles, including the 2001 project Vanishing Point with violist Mat Maneri, cellist Erik Friedlander, and bassist Mark Dresser. He reconvened the Parkins-Black trio for Arcanum Moderne in 2003 and marked its tenth anniversary with the 2005 album Ten. A duo with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier yielded Every So Often in 2008; another duo recording, Inbetween Spaces, appeared in 2010 with drummer Gerry Hemingway. Eskelin rejoined David Liebman for Non Sequiturs in 2012 and participated in several subsequent live documents. He also contributed to the 2012 session Dirigo Rataplan alongside trumpeter Dave Ballou, bassist Michael Formanek, and drummer Devin Gray. The trio with Weber and Griener issued Sensations of Tone in 2017 and Pearls in 2019.
