A native of Ratingen, West Germany, Helma Kaldewey is a musicologist, historian, and filmmaker, and the author of A People’s Music: Jazz in East Germany, 1945-1990 (Cambridge University Press). She earned her M.A. in Musicology and German Literature at the University of Cologne in 1990, and her Ph.D. in History from Tulane University in 2014.
She is the producer of two films on New Orleans’ music, in partnership with German public television and a German film fund: New Orleans – City of Jazz premiered on German TV, 3Sat, Arte in 1995, and Sugar B., a documentary on the New Orleans piano legend James Booker, premiered in 2003 and funded by Filmbüro NRW. To accompany Sugar B., she co-produced the album Patchwork: A Tribute to James Booker on STR Digital Records, released in 2004.
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she spent many years traveling to East Germany both for familial and for academic reasons. Because of her longstanding interest in jazz and the music of New Orleans, she began traveling regularly to the United States in 1988, and in 1999, moved permanently to New Orleans where she continued her studies of the city’s history and culture as well as her academic career. The recipient of research fellowships from Tulane University and the Freie Universität Berlin, she has taught German language and literature at Tulane, Loyola and Dillard Universities.