Crossing Over

Want to describe Nu Directions? You better have plenty of hyphens.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Jun 16, 2010

MIXED COMPANY: Thomas Madeja (center, with trumpet) and Nu Directions.

[ jazz ]

"I wanted to create a group combining musicians from different backgrounds," says trumpeter-composer Thomas Madeja of his hybrid classical-jazz brass-percussion ensemble Nu Directions Chamber Brass (one has to come armed with plenty of hyphens to describe what Madeja is up to).

Bass trombonist Barry McCommon alone exemplifies the types of crossover thinking that Madeja is after. A Curtis grad, McCommon is bass trombonist for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, OperaDelaware and Reading Symphony Orchestra, among others; Madeja met him on a gig with an R&B cover band. "Every single person in the group plays multiple genres of music," Madeja says. "Not one person is a strict straight-ahead jazz player or a strict orchestral musician; everybody's got a pretty varied background."

That includes Madeja, who seems to have as many homes as he does influences. Born in Chicago and raised in upstate New York, the trumpeter studied music at the University of Illinois and Baylor University in Texas before landing in Philly four years ago, where he's a member of both Bobby Zankel's avant-big band Warriors of the Wonderful Sound and the jam-rock-jazz group Agent Moosehead. Friday's NDCB performance will serve as a send-off before Madeja moves back to Chicago (though he'll return in October to celebrate the release of the ensemble's first full-length CD).

While the band keeps a few jazz standards and classical arrangements in its book, its main purpose is to perform Madeja's own music, a blend of modern minimalism and improvisatory experimentation. "I guess the main idea is to take Steve Reich's music, that very minimalist but rhythmic groove-based sound, and add all this improvising and freedom into it," Madeja explains.

His writing for the band is inspired, Madeja says, by its members: McCommon; Dawn Webster, an experimental trumpeter who also performs with classical and early music ensembles and the Balkan-flavored West Philly Orchestra; trombonist Larry Toft, another Zankel Warrior and co-founder of Tritone's Avant Ascension series; Gabe Globus-Hoenich, an orchestral percussionist and jazz drummer; and New York-based drummer Mason Ingram, a Baylor classmate who plays rock, jazz and world music.

The eccentric instrumentation inspires Madeja, but then again, it had to. "There's no other instrumentation like this, so it's hard to play other people's music. I think that's how I got seriously into composing — I was trying to think of what to play and there just wasn't much out there. So I had to write it."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Fri., June 18, 8 p.m., free, with El Fin Del Mundo Trio and The Renamers, Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., bowerbird.org.

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