Harald Kisiedu
Hochschule (University of Applied Sciences) Osnabrück
Harald Kisiedu is a historical musicologist who completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he worked under the supervision of George E. Lewis. His research interests include jazz as a global phenomenon, music of the African diaspora, black experimentalism, the European post-war avant-garde, the intersection between music and politics, improvisation, transnationalism, and Wagner. He has written on Peter Brötzmann, Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, Muhal Richard Abrams, jazz and popular music in Terezín, and the political reception of Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nürnberg in the National Socialist Regime. He also holds graduate degrees in political science and German studies from the University of Hamburg. Kisiedu is a saxophonist who has performed with Champion Jack Dupree, Hannibal Lokumbe, Branford Marsalis, George Lewis, and Henry Grimes. He has recorded with the musical collective Burnt Sugar The Arkestra. Between 2015 and 2017 he was a postdoctoral fellow with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph and at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His book on jazz experimentalism in West and East Germany between 1950 and 1975 is forthcoming in spring of 2019.
