BIRD.(The Talk of the Town)(14-year-old alto saxophone player Elijah Shiffer)

The Creative Jazz Organization, which was founded in the early nineteen-seventies by music buffs associated with the Rochdale Village Community Center, in Queens, holds jam sessions on Wednesday nights at Manhattan Proper, a bar and restaurant at the corner of Linden Boulevard and 217th Street, in Cambria Heights. The walls in the Proper are painted pink, and there's a glass-enclosed bar up front, where jazz-indifferent customers can drink beer and watch baseball on TV. Admission is ten dollars. The music usually starts a little after eight.

C.J.O. performers over the years have included Etta Jones, Roy Haynes, and Walter Perkins. Until he died, earlier this month, at the age of ninety-four, the oldest regular was Hank Turner, a trumpet player and former bandleader, who once fired Charlie Parker for habitually arriving late for rehearsals. The youngest C.J.O. performer, by approximately as wide a margin as Turner was the oldest, is Elijah Shiffer, whose instrument is the alto saxophone. Elijah made his first appearance in the summer of 2005, when he was thirteen. His father, Michael, owns a high-end garage in Mount Vernon, and his mother, Amy Silberkleit, is an artist. Elijah has an angelic face and longish wavy brown hair, and he sometimes yawns and looks bored while waiting for his turn to play. Reuben C. Bankhead, who retired as a New York City police detective twenty-five years ago and is the C.J.O.'s president, said the other night, "To look at Elijah, you'd think he should be playing Nintendo. But then he gets that horn out and blows everybody away."

Elijah is homeschooled. He writes avidly and well, and he loves playing with language--he is fairly certain, for example, that Django Reinhardt is the only jazz musician whose name contains two silent "d"s--but he doesn't converse easily with other people. Children with similar combinations of talents and apparent emotional distance are often characterized by various clinical terms, which Elijah's parents do not use, feeling that they limit rather than enlighten.

"His wiring is different," his father said. "He loves to play music with anybody, and I think he's interested in other people, but there is a kind of connection that just isn't made. Except for music, he is almost a hundred-per-cent uninvolved with other kids. We were very worried about him for a while, and one of the things that I took comfort from was his music, which shows that he obviously has the full range of emotions, and can communicate them. Jazz has been a conduit for him."

Elijah probably came to music by way of his other main passion, which is ornithology. "When he was a little kid, he sort of organized his world around birds," his father went ...