The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Spring Music Grant to Chase Elodia to help complete his project, “Phantoms Among Us”.

Chase Elodia is a composer and drummer based in Brooklyn, New York. His music takes cues from media theorists, singer-songwriters, jazz composers, and poets to ask questions about how we relate to both ourselves and one another in our increasingly digitized, secularized cultural moment. In 2021, he was announced as a recipient of ASCAP’s Young Jazz Composers Award for his song “The World Is Now Your Own,” composed in honor of the birth of pianist Glenn Zaleski and violinist Tomoko Omura’s child.

Phantoms Among Us is a set of new original music for jazz ensemble+voice that explores the idea of "Ambiguous Loss" through the lens of an intergenerational family portrait. Penned by social scientist Pauline Boss, the concept of "ambiguous loss" refers to that particular, ongoing mode of grief that emerges without a clear beginning or ending point.

Far from easily passing through the traditional "five stages of grief," those gripped by ambiguous loss live their lives perpetually in the shadow of a grief that is both omnipresent but difficult to articulate and define, taking on a "phantom"-like quality. Our lives abound with examples: what does it mean to love a father who is physically present but mentally absent, caught in the grips of a worsening dementia? What does it mean to care about a relative whose depression and sense of isolation is worsening, despite their ostensible professional and familial success? What does it mean to be a child reckoning with the indelible impact of the therapeutic choices of her parents made on her behalf throughout her childhood? These questions have no easy answers or solutions; rather, they demand to be sounded out and explored through song.

Chase has presented his work in clubs and festivals across the world. In the past decade, he has performed in Austria, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Greece, Jordan, Netherlands, Switzerland, and across the United States in venues such as Bimhuis, Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, the San Jose Jazz Festival, the Tabuleiro Jazz Festival, and the Vienna Jazz Festival. He has shared the stage with Emma Frank, Morgan Guerin, and Allegra Krieger, and performs regularly with the Alex Hamburger Quartet and the ensemble Echoes. His writing about music has been published in Music & Literature, Drum! Magazine, and the Percussive Arts Society. In 2020, he was awarded a grant by the Boulder County Arts Association to record Portrait Imperfect – his album featuring Claire Dickson, Morgan Guerin, Theo Walentinty, and Tyrone Allen – which was released on Biophilia Records in May 2022 and hailed as “ambitious” and “artful” by Downbeat Magazine. A 2022 MacDowell Fellow, Elodia is currently at work on a new set of music for this ensemble.

Please visit Chase’s Instagram, and website for more information.