Elias Haslanger

Elias Haslanger plays The Continental Gallery on Monday, October 5, leading his band Church for a night of live jazz. Haslanger is an Austin-based saxophonist and composer, and this is one of his home-city dates.

If you're not familiar with his work, his album Legacy is a good place to start. It's the record that put him on the map for a lot of people, and it caught the attention of Paris Move, which wrote that he "honors the masters who shaped him while revealing a voice that is unmistakably his own" and added that he "has created what may well become the defining recording of his career." That's a high bar to set, and it gives you a sense of where he's coming from: a player who knows the jazz tradition well enough to work within it and step away from it at the same time.

On the night, he'll be leading Church, the band he's built around his own writing. As a bandleader, he's the one steering the ship, and the set will be built around his compositions. It's a live jazz show in the most straightforward sense—a group of musicians on stage playing through a set, with the saxophone right at the center of it.

The show starts at 8:30 PM at The Continental Gallery, and tickets are $10.