About Dan

I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and graduated from St. Sebastian’s School in 1992.  After a year at Oberlin College, I moved to New York City in 1993 and graduated from New York University (B.A.) in 1996.  In 1997 and 1998, I played guitar in a ska band called Skavoovie and the Epitones.

Afterward, I returned to NYU to study ethnomusicology.  I defended my dissertation about Jamaican mento music in November 2007.  (My committee included Gage Averill, Kenneth Bilby, Jason Stanyek, Mick Moloney and Martin Daughtry.)  If you’re interested in reading this work, it’s available for order through ProQuest and is shockingly easy to get:

Mento, Jamaica’s original music: Development, tourism and the nationalist frame. New York University, 2007; AAT 3310562

If you are affiliated with an institution that subscribes to ProQuest (say, a college or university), you can simply obtain a copy through your library’s ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database.  If you have no institutional affiliation (and thus no access to ProQuest’s Dissertations & Theses Database) you can order a copy through ProQuest’s Dissertation Express service.  (I find the diss is easiest to access using the catalogue number, which is 3310562.)

I worked at the ARChive of Comtemporary Music between May 2007 and January 2009.  After leaving the ARC, I traveled to Austria, Jamaica and Ireland.  In November 2009, I returned to Jamaica to play banjo on an album for the Jolly Boys; in April-July 2010 I was the project’s music director.  In December 2009 and January 2010, I traveled to Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, Carriacou and Antigua for the Musical Instrument Museum to buy instruments for their collection.

I am fascinated by the history of ice cream truck music (I have an chapter about it in a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press) and play Irish music on the tenor banjo.  These days, I run a session at a pub called Lillie’s and lead a group called the Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra.

My writing has appeared in several places, including the Caribbean Studies Journal, Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of the Society for American Music, Esopus, the Jamaica Observer, the Concise Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, The World of Music, Ethnomusicology, and the Yearbook for Traditional Music.  In December 2001, I wrote an article about mento for Beat magazine that seemed to help revive interest in the genre.  I am co-author (with Kenneth Bilby) of “The English-Speaking Caribbean: Re-Embodying the Colonial Ballroom” in Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean (Temple University Press, 2009) and co-author (with Peter Manuel) of The Reggae Scene: The Stars, the Fans, the Music (Enslow, 2009).

I live in Queens with my wife Gail and our cat, Kwanda, I love the Red Sox and I can be reached via email at danieltneely at gmail dot com.