Harris Eisenstadt

Harris Eisenstadt (b. Toronto, 1975) is a Brooklyn-based drummer and composer whose music bends between the intimate and the expansive, with what The New Yorker calls a “deep-sighted and elastic view of improvised music.”

Eisenstadt has published essays, articles and radio programs on NPR, Public Radio International, Afropop Worldwide, and in John Zorn’s Arcana series. His recording Canada Day IV (2015) was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air.  His 2018 music film We Are All Worthy of One Another, a collaboration with Matanzas, Cuba’s artist collective El Almacén, brought together more than thirty Cuban folkloric and classical musicians and filmmakers.

While best known for leading small and mid-sized improvising ensembles, Eisenstadt has also composed through-composed works for larger forces: his first orchestral piece, Palimpsest, was premiered by with the American Composers Orchestra (2011), followed by Four Songs (2013), commissioned by the Brooklyn Conservatory Community Orchestra. His first string quartet, Whatever Will Happen That Will Also Be, was recorded by Mivos Quartet (2015).

Eisenstadt is Senior Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at SUNY Maritime College, where he has taught since 2010. He has been awarded the President’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2019) and the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022) and received numerous grants for research in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Miami, and Spain. For more than a decade, Prof. Eisenstadt has curated and produced the Music at Maritime Concert Series, a once-per-semester campus event that brings musicians of international renown to campus to perform for and interact with students in the Special Events Room, including many of New York’s leading jazz musicians and world music artists from Bali, Cuba, Gambia, India, Morocco and Senegal.