Known for his dazzling technique and sweeping sound, Elliott Davis is a violinist who specializes in Romantic, Modernist and Jazz musics. He holds a B.Mus in Violin Performance and a B.A. in Honors History from McGill University in Montreal, QC. He currently lives in Upper Manhattan, studying as a Musicology Ph.D. student at CUNY Graduate Center. As part of this role, he teaches music appreciation at Queens College. His main academic interest involves the affinities between political economy, ideology, and musical aesthetics, especially in Gilded Age America.
Elliott is available for contracted gigs, studio work, arranging, transcribing, and has many years of diverse teaching experience.
Growing up in Connecticut, he studied violin with Annie Trepanier and appeared as a concerto soloist with the Nutmeg and West Hartford Symphony Orchestras. In the summer of 2019, he toured Europe as a member of the National Youth Orchestra (NYO-USA). He was also a fellow at Colorado College Summer Music in 2022. His most prominent teachers have included Axel Strauss, Erika Raum, Kerson Leong, André Roy, Dorian Bandy, and Catherine Cosbey.
He has served as concertmaster of the McGill Symphony Orchestra and was a finalist in the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 McGill Concerto Competitions. Upon graduation, he was awarded the prestigious Tali Salinger Gold Medal in music performance. From 2023-2025, he performed often with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.
He is also a prolific jazz violinist who improvises in multiple early-midcentury styles. Interested in both symphonic jazz and hard bop, he can quickly switch between driving bebop lines and melodic, romantic descants. In recent years he has also arranged and performed transcriptions by Charlie Parker and Art Tatum for various ensembles. Occasionally, he attends an R&B jam with his 5-string electric violin.
As a musician-historian, Elliott is interested in how the same pieces of music have been conceptualized and interpreted across different moments in time. For him this often involves incorporating the intellectual and social contexts of classic works into concert programming and the creative process, without losing sight of what these works might mean to 21st-century audiences.
His favorite composers include Scriabin, Szymanowski, Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner, Ravel, Gershwin, Ellington, and Wayne Shorter.
Elliott plays on a beautiful 2017 instrument with an open, warm tone made by Denis Cormier of Montreal, QC.