nataliegreffel

Natalie Greffel is an artist-scholar and booker for Berlin’s XJAZZ Festival. Winner of the 2023 German Jazz Award (Vocals), she blends African diasporic traditions, poetry, and collective memory. She is a PhD student at Harvard and performs internationally.

Natalie Greffel is a composer, singer, bass player, and artist-scholar whose work moves fluidly between performance, composition, research, and cultural production. She is also a booker for Berlin’s XJAZZ Festival, where she helps shape contemporary jazz and experimental music programming with a strong emphasis on transnational and diasporic perspectives. In 2023, she received the German Jazz Award for Vocals, recognizing her distinctive artistic voice and her ability to bridge musical innovation with critical inquiry. Greffel’s artistic practice draws from African diasporic traditions, combining sound, poetry, and narrative to explore Black identity, collective memory, and speculative pasts and futures. Engaging questions of history, displacement, and belonging, she treats music as both aesthetic practice and knowledge production. She is the musical director for the New York–based duo Musclecars and has collaborated with artists including Angel Bat Dawid, Anthony Hervey, Radio Citizen, Pamela Sneed, and Onom Agemo & the Disco Jumpers. Currently completing a new album and a larger project planned for fall 2026. Greffel is a PhD student in Creative Practice / Critical Inquiry at Harvard University. Her research on composing through a speculative African diaspora informs her international performance practice across Europe, the Americas, and beyond. Her debut album, Para Todos (2020), reflects her commitment to sonic hybridity, fusing her Mozambican heritage with Afro-Brazilian rhythms, jazz, and contemporary improvisational practices. The album positions rhythm and voice as sites of cultural memory while gesturing toward future-oriented musical forms rooted in diasporic exchange. Greffel is also the founder of New Past, a collective that uses music and collaborative research. Through this project, she has worked with artists including Philo Tsoungui, Eden Girma, Morgan Guerin, and Musclecars, creating a platform for critical dialogue through sound and performance.