Chris Kelsey

Chris Kelsey (born June 5, 1961) is an American-born jazz saxophonist, composer, music critic, and novelist.

As a critic, he has written for leading jazz publications and web sites, including Jazziz, JazzTimes, Cadence, AllMusic, and Jazz.com.

During and immediately following his college days, he played in various rock, jazz, and rhythm & blues bands in the vicinity of Oklahoma City.

After a lull of three years – during which he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and contemplated becoming a visual artist – he resumed playing music.

During this period he played the Knitting Factory (including performing at several of that club's annual summer jazz festivals) and other Downtown NYC venues.

The next year he recorded The Ingenious Gentleman of the Lower East Side with a trio that included Ware and bassist Dominic Duval, also for C.I.M.P.

After releasing a trio of albums on his own label in 1999, Kelsey essentially stopped playing the saxophone for several years, while he and his wife raised their two small children.

He formed a new trio with bassist Francois Grillot and drummer Jay Rosen, the band's music influenced by the compositional concepts of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler.

Two years later, with trumpeter John Carlson, the group recorded its final two albums for C.I.M.P., The Crookedest Straight Line Vols.

In Other Words, the Opposite of Paul Desmond),[1] featured a cover of Albert Ayler's “Ghosts”, the first time one of Kelsey's groups would record a composition other than his own.

In 2011, DeSalvo's Unseen Rain label released Happy House, a set of interpretations of Ornette Coleman tunes by a quartet comprising Kelsey, trombonist Pat Hall, six-string electric bassist Joe Gallant, and drummer Dean Sharp.

In 2018, Black Rose Writing published Kelsey's first novel, Where the Hurt Is, a historical mystery set in 1965, that tells the story of a race-based murder in a small all-white Oklahoma town and the efforts of the local police chief, Emmett Hardy, to solve the crime.

On the book's cover, author Anne Hillerman called it: "Poignant and funny, studded with characters who haunt your imagination long after you've read the final page."

He began contributing to Jazziz magazine in 1995, writing reviews and profiles of such then-obscure Downtown musicians as William Parker, Charles Gayle, and Myra Melford.