Musician Heads For The Stars

“Indigo Seven,” the opening and title track from Nick Di Maria’s latest album, starts with a flourish from a keyboard and drums that then heads off on a searching groove. A trumpet delivers a melody that takes its time unspooling over the rhythm. As the band settles in, the texture gets deeper and darker, and doesn’t return until nearly 10 minutes later, when the melody takes over again. It’s a long trip — fitting, since part of the New Haven-based musician’s mission is to explore possibilities, to make space. On Indigo Seven, with its overt nods to science fiction, that mission couldn’t be more apparent.

The connected history of jazz and science fiction is several decades old, going back at least as far as Sun Ra, who famously declared himself to be a visitor from Saturn on a mission to preach peace and infused his music with an extraterrestrial mindset. But the connections exist in more mainstream jazz as well. For instance, ​“a lot of people forget that Wayne Shorter, who’s probably the greatest composer of the small-group era, was a huge science fiction fan,” Di Maria said. In Footprints, a 2004 biography of him by Michelle Mercer, ​“he talks about all the science fiction that inspired him when he was a kid, and a lot of his compositions are sci-fi themed.”

The connection continues to right now, with bands like the UK-based The Comet Is Coming. ​“That’s the Sun Ra of our generation,” Di Maria said. ​“This is what the future sounds like to me.”

“I feel a kinship and there’s a precedent for it,” Di Maria said. ​“Science fiction has always been in my blood, from when I was little kid.” If he played games outside, rather than cops and robbers, ​“I’d pretend I was stranded on a different planet.” He recalled a string of science fiction movies pulling him through his youth. ​“It was always there.”

As Di Maria looks at his recorded music so far, he said, ​“all of my albums have science fiction in there.” With 2015’s Time Circuit, which incorporated electronics and effects into his sound, Di Maria nailed down that ​“this is my vibe — this is what I do. As I’ve come to establish what I more electronic sound is going to be, it’s going to be there.”

Indigo Seven — named, like a previous album Black Thirteen, after one of the orbs in Stephen King’s Dark Tower book series — ​“was five compositions that I thought sounded good together.” He didn’t have titles for them, so he went to ​“my SF bag” for them. The song ​“Sagittaron” is named after a planet in the TV series Battlestar Galactica that’s annihilated by a race of robots at the beginning of the series.“It sounds like the mayhem that came with evacuating that world,” Di Maria said.

It’s also, in two words, pretty groovy, as the drum struts forward on a swinging shuffle and the rest of the band — Brian Suto on guitar, Andrew Kosiba on keys, Andrew Zwart on bass, and Ryan Hamme on drums — rides a riff that lets Di Maria ricochet off their syncopation. Suto and Kosiba both take a ride that lets them uncork angular solos before the band comes together for a soaring ascending line that feels like escape.

The band’s ensemble work comes most to the fore in ​“Ceres Station” (named after a location in The Expanse science fiction series) as they fit together interlocking pieces to make a brooding rhythm that lets Di Maria play at his most free.

“My fusion persona is where the roots come out,” Di Maria said. He’s toying with the possibility of making 13 albums to correspond to all 13 orbs in King’s series. But even as is, the album titles serve as inspirations and entry points for listening. ​“I want tunes that encompass that color. I want you to see those colors as you listen,” he said.

Indigo Seven, like Di Maria’s organizing of New Haven Jazz Underground streaming events, is evidence of what Di Maria was doing during the Covid-19 shutdown outside of his work as a teacher. ​“I spent the pandemic writing,” he said. ​“As soon as it was safe I was going to record.” Indigo Seven ​“is just one of the many projects” he wants to do in 2021 and beyond.

During the shutdown, Di Maria also dove into another art form. ​“I painted the cover,” he said. ​“It’s my debut as an artist.”