New jazz and pop directors at the ZHdK
As of this fall semester, Gregor Schwellenbach will take over as Head of Major Pop Bachelor and Master at the ZHdK and Niko Seibold as Head of Major Jazz Bachelor.
Born in 1971, Gregor Schwellenbach is a multi-instrumentalist, arranger and composer for cinema, TV, radio plays and theater. He works with rappers (Xatar, Alligatoah, Souly), dance producers (Kölsch, Brandt Brauer Frick) and Can founder Irmin Schmidt, with whom he has a long-standing artistic partnership. At the Folkwang University of the Arts, he was instrumental in establishing the Master of Popular Music and taught there for 11 years.
38-year-old Niko Seibold is a saxophonist, composer, bandleader and program director. He is co-founder of the Toskana Jazzworkshop and the Basel leftfield label Hout Records as well as artistic director of the Tis Jazz Fest in Basel and the Sunday matinees in the Merian Gärten in Basel. He is also a lecturer in composition and theory at the ZHdK PreCollege of Music. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Jim McNeely and Dave Liebman, at the Jazzcampus Basel with Domenic Landolf and Guillermo Klein and at the MuHo Mannheim with Jürgen Seefelder.
Schwellenbach succeeds Heiko Freund, who built up the Pop study programs at the ZHdK and led them for twenty years. Seibold succeeds Matthias Kohler.
