For their 2026 Angel City Jazz Refractions performance, Harris Eisenstadt: Aberikula will perform creative music arrangements of traditional Afro-Cuban chants and rhythms. This iteration of the group first played in fall 2025 at the invitation of Jazz Shares in western Massachusetts. Eisenstadt’s association with each musician dates to the early 2000s, as does his investigation of African and Diaspora music cultures, documented on earlier recordings Jalolu (CIMP, 2003) and Guewel (Clean Feed, 2008). Schoenbeck and Eisenstadt have played as a duo since 2000, and in Eisenstadt’s quartet Golden State since 2013.  Sanchez and Eisenstadt played together in Eisenstadt’s September Trio, active mostly in Europe from 2010-14, and as a duo as well.

Harris Eisenstadt 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.” Over the past two decades, Eisenstadt has appeared on around eighty recordings, releasing more than twenty albums as a bandleader and leading many other projects across a wide range of settings. In 2024, he won Downbeat’s International Critics Poll for Rising Star Percussion after years of steady recognition. His albums regularly land on year-end critics’ lists for their adventurous spirit and clarity of vision. A longtime explorer of African and Diaspora music traditions, Eisenstadt has made extended research trips to Gambia, Senegal, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico City, and Miami. He plays frequently for Afro-Cuban ceremonial drummings around New York City.

“Eisenstadt’s light hand kept a steady pulse without ever locking into a conventional groove. The contemplative reverence they evoked allowed me to concentrate on the trio’s sonority, which was beautiful. Eisenstadt’s touch on batá was pure caress, and he used the six drumheads at his disposal to create beautiful melody.”

— Glenn Siegel, Jazz Ruminations

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