This feature is a part of Ocean State Sessions.
“The only thing that matters is showing up.” It’s a simple concept, really. But it’s one that’s been on Chase Ceglie’s mind for a while. “You’re making music part of your daily routine, and you’re documenting. You’re not trying to create something. So you’re just working. You’re doing the work every day. You’re finding a low-stakes situation to make music.”
Perhaps it’s Ceglie’s experience as a music teacher that helped him stay in the mind space of just doing the work. “When I actually am faced with problems in my own process, I can kind of tell myself, ‘oh, well, what would I tell a student in that moment?’” Ceglie approaches teaching as less of a hierarchical environment, trying to stay on the level with his students. It’s a method likely adopted from his days at Berklee College of Music, where he became a tutor for incoming freshmen and struggling sophomores. “That was a really good challenge for me,” Chase recalls.
Today, Chase Ceglie teaches through the Newport Festival Foundation. “I teach at the Met School. I teach an internship where the kids basically learn how to play music in a band from the ground up.” The culmination? “By the end of the year, they perform at the Newport Folk Festival.”
Being a music teacher means Chase needs to know a little about a lot. Ceglie is proficient in many instruments, but there is one instrument he considers his main tool. “To be honest, I feel like I’m really just a saxophone player,” he told us. “And then everything else that I play - piano, bass, guitar, drums, sing, blah blah - are just instruments that I can get by on to actualize the music that I’m writing. So I never took a drum lesson or piano lesson or a guitar lesson, bass lesson.”
With enough knowledge to write his own music, Ceglie has been hard at work producing his own works over the years. “Songwriting is my favorite thing to do. And then to figure out how to produce the songs and what style. I use genre as a palette. So if I’m trying to make the audience feel a certain way.”
Chase Ceglie’s music is available on multiple streaming platforms, including Apple Music, Spotify, Bandcamp, and YouTube Music.
