Ehran Yehuda Elisha is a drummer, percussionist and composer who has worked in and around the New York free jazz and Downtown scenes since the early 1990s, mostly on small labels and largely outside the notice of the wider jazz press. Bob Rusch, who produced most of his recorded output, described him in 1998 as a native New Yorker born on August 4, 1966; the German Wikipedia entry treats him as an Israeli musician born around 1965. The two readings are not necessarily in conflict, since his family is Israeli, but no source consulted states a birthplace outright.

The household was a musical one. His father, Haim Elisha, was born in Jerusalem in 1935, studied piano at the Rubin Academy there and then at the Juilliard School and the New England Conservatory, took conducting lessons from Pierre Monteux, and went on to spend thirty-eight years as a professor of music at the State University of New York in Rockland County, where he also served as artistic director and conductor of Rockland Opera. He is a painter as well, and his canvases appear on the covers of two of his son's albums. Father and son have recorded together repeatedly.

Elisha's training is unusually well documented for a musician of his profile. He studied first at Bennington College, where his teachers included Bill Dixon and Milford Graves, then at Wesleyan University, where he worked with Ed Blackwell, the trombonist and tuba player Bill Lowe, the Ghanaian master drummer Abraham Adzenyah, and Sumarsam in Javanese gamelan. He took a master's degree there in 1991 with a thesis titled Steady Ascension: Toward an Aesthetic in the Performance of Contemporary Improvised and Composed Music, which is still listed in Wesleyan's register of ethnomusicology and composition theses. In his own sleeve notes to The Kicker he thanks a wider group of mentors and teachers: Blackwell, Graves, Max Roach, Dixon, Lowe, Arthur Brooks, Anthony Braxton and Justin DiCioccio. Lowe would later join his band, and Elisha played in Dixon's duo, trio and large ensembles.

His first release was Shoresh, an autobiographical suite recorded in 1994 with his Kinetic Music Ensemble and issued in 1997 on Kinetic Music, carrying the catalogue prefix of EYEtone, Elisha's own publishing imprint and ASCAP affiliation. A trio date followed on December 26, 1995 at the Knitting Factory in New York with trumpeter Roy Campbell and bassist Wilber Morris, released by Cadence Jazz Records in 1998 as Suite Empathy. Two months after that release, on February 12, 1998, the Ehran Elisha Ensemble made The Kicker at CIMP's Spirit Room studio in Rossie, New York, with Campbell, Morris, tenor saxophonist David Bindman and violinist Sam Bardfeld. The record is a single four-part suite built on what Elisha calls a Kinetic Music Prose Score, a written narrative that supplies form, texture and dialogue to the improvisers instead of conventional notation. CIMP's engineer Marc Rusch noted that the quintet was captured with only two microphones, the players arranged in a fixed arc across the room.

The Ensemble returned to the Spirit Room on August 9 and 10, 1999 for The Lowdown, with Drew Gress on bass and Bill Lowe added on trombone and tuba. Fourteen years later it recorded Continue, released by Cadence Jazz Records, with Ken Filiano on bass and Haim Elisha on piano; the title piece is a forty-five minute work in four parts, again written as a prose score, and the album closes with a solo drum elegy for Elisha's late friend Josh Waldman. On April 6, 2013 he taped two entirely different quintets in one evening at IBeam in Brooklyn, issued in 2016 as the double album Kindred Spirit: Quintets. The first disc, "Kindred Soul," has Campbell, Bardfeld, Haim Elisha and bassist Dave Phillips; the second, "Spirit Suite," has Michaël Attias on alto and baritone saxophone, Yoni Kretzmer on tenor, Rick Parker on trombone and Sean Conly on bass. Campbell died in January 2014, so the first disc holds some of his last recorded work.

Campbell was Elisha's closest partner. The two played together for roughly two decades, co-led an octet around 2005, and worked as a trumpet-and-drums duo that appeared at the seventeenth Vision Festival at Roulette. Their duo album Watching Cartoons With Eddie was cut at Peter Karl Recording Studios in Brooklyn on October 22, 2008, mixed the following winter, and released in 2011. The title refers to Ed Blackwell, who made his young student sit through cartoons before getting down to work, and the record's long central piece, "For BD," is a sound poem for Bill Dixon, a mentor to both men, written while Dixon was still alive. It was one of the first two releases on OutNow Recordings, a label run by Kretzmer with the guitarists Yair Yona and Ido Bukelman. The other was East Of Jaffa, recorded at Zvi Joffe's studio in Tel Aviv on April 21, 2011, a trio with Haim Elisha and the South African-born Israeli clarinetist Harold Rubin. A further quartet session with Haim Elisha, the multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter and bassist Jeremy Harlos was taped at Peter Karl's studio on March 16, 2014 and released four years later as Before Or After on EYEtone.

Since 2010 Elisha has spent part of each summer in Israel, playing freely improvised sets with the Tel Aviv saxophonist Albert Beger. In September 2012 Beger made the trip in the other direction, and after two rehearsals with Dave Phillips the three drove upstate to the Spirit Room and recorded over two days, September 17 and 18. The first day was Rosh Hashanah, and the Hebrew word rosh, meaning head, gave the first album its title. CIMP issued Heads in 2018, six years after the session, and Tales in December 2019, seven years after it. Heads is billed with Elisha's name first, on the sleeve and in every catalogue listing, and its central work is his four-part "Trio Suite: For Milford Graves"; the trio also plays Beger's ballad "The Way To Go," written for his late mother. Tales is billed to the three men as a joint group, and its eight shorter pieces are split among all of them, two by Beger, two by Elisha, one by Phillips and three co-written. Neither record carries an explicit leader credit, and the pair is best read as a co-operative trio rather than as anyone's date.

Elisha composes as much as he drums, and his records are built around long multi-part structures rather than around blowing on a theme. The prose score is his characteristic device: a written narrative of form, texture, chronology and dialogue that guides improvisers without notating them, used for the suites on both The Kicker and Continue. His three principal drum teachers left distinguishable marks, Max Roach's compositional discipline, Ed Blackwell's singing, African-inflected melodic touch on the kit, and Milford Graves's pulse-dissolving freedom, and he has written explicit tributes to Blackwell and Graves. The Wesleyan years under Abraham Adzenyah and Sumarsam show in the African polyrhythm that reviewers repeatedly single out, and Middle Eastern phrasing and modes surface alongside it. Writing for The Free Jazz Collective, Stef Gijssels called him possibly one of the best unknown drummers around and heard Watching Cartoons With Eddie as a descendant of Don Cherry and Blackwell's Mu; the same publication described his playing across the Kindred Spirit quintets as an equal partner in melody and tempo rather than a rhythm-section function. He has tended to build bands out of long personal relationships, two decades with Roy Campbell and a lifetime with his father, rather than assembling new personnel for each record.