Wesleyan Music Graduate Students

Raphaëlle Brochet

rbrochet_at_wesleyan.edu

An accomplished jazz vocalist, Raphaëlle has also been training in Carnatic music with Sarada Thota and Ghatam Govindarajan in Madras for several years.   She has additionally studied Persian classical music with Fariba Davudi in Teheran and Babak Towhidi in Montreal.  After earning a degree in Anthropology in Paris from the Sorbonne and a degree in Jazz Performance from the Nantes Conservatory, she moved to Montreal and then to New York to perform in various musical projects.  She is now at Wesleyan sharpening her solkattu and Carnatic vocal skills with Balasubramaniyam and David Nelson.  She performs regularly in the United States, Canada and Europe.  Her research interests include improvisation and personal style in Carnatic and Persian vocal perforamance.
personal site: www.myspace.com/raphaellebrochet

Andrew Colwell

acolwell_at_wesleyan.edu

Andrew was born in Mexico City to a Colombian mother and American father, but raised overseas in several countries and in the USA. He recieved his BA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where, after experimenting in various media formats, he focused on critical theory and representations of globalization in art. After graduating, he lived in Mongolia for two years where he mainly studied xoomi, or what is generally called “throat-singing” in the West, but also performed in numerous contexts ranging from the traditional to the experimental, a weekly jazz gig to a collaboration with Altan Urag, composers of the soundtrack to “Mongol” (2007). He performed at Xoomi Naadaam 2007, a festival for Mongolian throat-singing, at which he was awarded membership to the Mongol Xoomi Association thus becoming its first American member. His current work continues to explore the Mongolian soundscape and global flows of music into, out of and within it. His more general interests include improvisation, nomadic musical traditions and specialized vocalization techniques.

Yun Fan

yfan01_at_wesleyan.edu

David C. Fossum

dfossum_at_wesleyan.edu

Dave has a B.A. in English/Comparative Literature from George Mason University, where he also studied classical and jazz guitar and minored in both Music and Jazz Studies.  He joined the Peace Corps in 2004 and spent the next two years teaching English in a small town in Turkmenistan.  There he plugged into a network of gifted musicians, and he spent his free time enjoying the rich culture surrounding the music of bards called bagşy.  During a year-long apprenticeship, he learned to play instrumental music on a two-stringed Turkmen lute called dutar.  After returning to his home town of Washington, D.C., he began performing with Turkish folk musician Hüsnü Aydoğdu, who taught him to play bağlama.  His M.A. thesis research focuses on personal style in instrumental Turkmen dutar performance.  His broader research interests include the musics of Central Asia, Turkey, and the Near East, and anything with strings – strummed, plucked, bowed or otherwise.  He is also currently the graduate curator of Wesleyan’s Virtual Instrument Museum.

Sarah Politz

spolitz_at_wesleyan.edu

Born in Atlanta, Georgia and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, Sarah received her B.M. in jazz trombone from Oberlin Conservatory in Oberlin, Ohio, where she studied with Robin Eubanks. She also holds a B.A. in English with honors from Oberlin College. In 2007, she was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to pursue her year-long, independent project on African jazz in Ghana, Benin, Mali, Senegal, and South Africa. Her travels gave her the opportunity to perform and record with artists such as Nii Marku, son of highlife trumpeter E.T. Mensah; Mac Tontoh, formerly of Osibisa; Kofi Ghanaba; Funsho Ogundipe; Vieux Farka Toure, son of Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure; Cheikh Tidiane Seck; Baaba Maal; and Mac McKenzie’s Cape Town Composer’s Workshop. Back in the U.S., Sarah is based in New Haven, Connecticut, where she performs with the Theodicy Jazz Quartet, the Skamatics, the Ray Gonzalez Latin Orchestra, and Orquesta Pueblo. Her research interests include popular African music, diasporic connections between Africa and the Americas, New Orleans musical traditions, and African spirituality such as vodoun and santerìa.