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.”

Over the past three decades, Eisenstadt has appeared on around eighty recordings, releasing more than twenty albums as a bandleader. The New York Times wrote “he takes a fixer’s approach to music-making. In his own music, especially, he looks for ways to forge ungainless into grace.”

In 2024, he won Downbeat’s International Critics Poll for Rising Star Percussion. His albums regularly appear 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 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.

Best known for leading small and mid-sized improvising ensembles, Eisenstadt has also written through-composed works: his first orchestral piece, Palimpsest, was premiered by 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)