His career is 'a work in progress'

April 24, 2007 at 4:57 AM EST
When Toronto's Harris Eisenstadt went off to Maine's Colby College to start university in 1994, his focus was hockey and baseball, sports at which he had excelled.
Those were my passions, the 31-year-old drummer, percussionist, composer and educator recalled in a recent interview. But when I got there, I did a total about-face.

I realized these were not the kind of guys I could spend four years with.
Eager to pursue more intellectual challenges, Eisenstadt quit both teams in his first year, studied music and world literature, and picked up an old hobby, drums, which he had learned to play in various high-school bands and teenage rock groups.
It was the start of an intense, 10-year immersion in music that has taken him from New York and Los Angeles, to London and Amsterdam, to Gambia and Senegal.

In a mere decade, he has released five albums of his own and played sideman on 35 others, working with such artists as trombonist Connie Bauer, saxophonist John Butcher, guitarist Nels Cline, saxophonist Lol Coxhill, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the late jazz musician Elton Dean (famous, among other things, for giving his first name to Reginald Dwight, the keyboardist in John Baldry's Bluesology band, now better known as Elton John).