Clarinetist Nat Seelen is the founder and artistic director of the Boston Festival of New Jewish Music and clarinetist with Ezekiel's Wheels Klezmer Band.

Nat began his musical training in the preparatory department of New England Conservatory, where he studied jazz, music theory, and early music. He continued at Brown University, where he led the university orchestra and the klezmer band while maintaining a busy schedule of chamber music, jazz combos, funk bands, and pit orchestras. Nat graduated from Brown with a Bachelor’s in Music Theory, History, and Composition and an honors thesis in ethnomusicology focused on klezmer music.

After Brown, Nat moved to Cambridge, MA, where he started the internationally-recognized Ezekiel’s Wheels Klezmer Band and developed an active freelance career on clarinet, saxophone, and percussion.

A composer and writer as well as a performer, Nat won first prize in the 2020 Kleztival Bubbe Awards for Best Original Klezmer Tune, first prize in the 2015 Klezmer Company Orchestra Composition Competition and a 2016 Iguana Music Fund grant to write a pedagogical text on klezmer music. Nat reviews concerts for AllAboutJazz and has performed on clarinet, saxophones, and percussion with Hankus Netsky, OktoEcho, The Late Risers, Phoenix Orchestra, The Macrotones, The Longwood Symphony, The Mercury Symphony, and many others. 

In past lives, he has been a zookeeper, a comic book librarian, a management consultant, and an AP music theory teacher.

Contact for booking, freelance engagements, recording, teaching, or speaking.

nathaniel.seelen@gmail.com

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