(BA in music from Bowdoin; two years of MFA studies in world music and jazz at Cal-Arts; Certificate in African Studies from the Institute for African Studies at Columbia; MA and MPhil in Ethnomusicology from Columbia) wrote his MA thesis on "Giant Step: Innovation, Technology and Performance in a Jazz Inspired Dance Club" which examines the appropriation of a jazz ideology in an underground New York hip hop club.. He is currently writing a dissertation entitled "Senegalese Urban Popular Music: Jazz, Mbalax, and Rap" based on fieldwork in Senegal supported by the Ford Foundation, and holds a pre-doctoral writing fellowship at Saint Lawrence University. His academic service included research on the Malcolm X project at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia. He was also a pre-doctoral fellow in the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Globalizing City Cultures at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society and participates frequently in the activities of the Center for Jazz Studies. His review of the CD "Keepers of the Talking Drum" appeared on Ethnomusicology Online (EOL). He presented a paper based on his research in Senegal at the 2003 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Email: trm8@columbia.edu