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 (1981-2018), Prima Materia with Rashied Ali (1992-2000), the Steve Lantner Trio and 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 sixty 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).
From 2008 to 2021, Chase chaired the Ear Training department at Berklee College of Music, where he continues to teach ear training, harmony, jazz composition, and jazz history and analysis. He has taught a wide range of college courses, ensembles, and lessons in jazz and improvised music since 1981.
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. He was involved with the Berklee Global Jazz Institute and its master’s degree program from the planning stages through Fall 2022. He has given clinics and masterclasses at about twenty-five schools in ten countries.
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, 2023-present), where he served as chair of jazz studies, chair of contemporary improvisation, and dean of faculty.
Long bio: https://allanchase.com/long-bio
Discography: https://allanchase.com/discography
Compositions: https://allanchase.com/compositions
Courses taught, 1981-present: Chase Courses Taught-1981-2022.pdf
Other people named Allan, Alan, Allen Chase https://allanchase.com/disambiguation
Berklee Oral History Project Interviews, 2009
Photographer: Geoff Adams