He performed on the radio station in Frankfurt am Main, then for three years beginning in 1949 led the Bayerischer Rundfunk in Nuremberg.

The next year he moved to Cologne,[2] and in 1957 took the leading position in the radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) big band, which included Dusko Goykovich and Jiggs Whigham.

[1] The band toured East Germany, USSR, Czechoslovakia, and several Arab countries during the 1960s.

[4] In 1958, Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln introduced the university's first jazz seminars, taught by Edelhagen.

Kurt Edelhagen's work "Hut Ab, Charly" was the theme music of Hungarian Television's police program "Blue Light" for decades.