Tag: Obituaries | Graduate

Royal Hartigan PhD’86 produced We Are One–blood drum spirit. The documentary explores the musical ties between jazz and its West African roots by following the American jazz group, blood drum spirit, to Ghana, featuring Abraham Adzenyah MA ’79, David Bindman ’85, MA ’87, and Wes Brown ’74. It won Best Documentary Feature at the Jukebox International Film Festival and Best Sound/Music Score at the Moscow Indie Film Festival.

Katie Vandrilla MALS’18 published a children’s book, Thumper’s Hospital Adventure, which follows the eponymous toy bunny on an adventure to find his best friend Katie after she is diagnosed with cancer. The real life Katie is a cancer survivor and all proceeds from the book will go to Make-A-Wish. Katie is a high school chemistry teacher and freelance journalist.

Managing Editor Cynthia Rockwell
crockwell@wesleyan.edu | 860/685-3705

David Novak MA ’99, assistant professor of music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has released his work, Japanoise, after more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States. In his book, David traces the “cultural feedback” that generates and sustains Noise, an underground music genre made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects that first emerged in the 1980s.

Bill Carbone MA ’07 writes, “I will cap off a busy summer of music festival performances with a trip to Europe to perform at the 24th annual Zappanale music festival in Bad Doberan, Germany. The festival invited my trio, The Z3, who perform the music of Frank Zappa rearranged for a trio of Hammond organ, guitar, and drums, to headline the second day of the festival and host the jam session on the third day. The festival also features more than a dozen alumni of the bands Zappa led between 1967 and 1992.