Nick Di Maria thought he was defying his parents when he picked up the trumpet and wound his way to a jazz career.
His parents — dad Michael, a Waterbury cop; mom Claudette, a social worker — suggested he listen to the brass-powered bands Chicago and Tower of Power when he was growing up. But that was their music.
He did love music, though. He chose the trumpet in fifth grade because … Chevy Chase looked cool miming playing it in a Paul Simon music video. He discovered ska. He got good on the instrument, played in drum corps, garage bands.
As a freshman in high school he discovered the music of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan. And that was it. “That’s what hooked me on jazz,” Di Maria recalled in a conversation Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Fast forward three decades. Di Maria, now 42, has become a staple of New Haven’s bebop-adjacent straight-ahead (as he describes it) jazz scene, in multiple ways. He organizes concerts featuring New Haven combos through an organization he started called the Jazz Undergorund. He performs standards with his own ensembles; he records and performs originals with a group he calls Skylab.
Di Maria decided to go old-school when he issued the most recent Skylab album on vinyl (among other formats). It was in a sense a trip back in time to when people listened to full albums on an LP or a CD, he said.
With streaming, he observed, “it’s so easy to just queue up 30 songs and not pay attention to the one that’s playing. You’ll have ‘So What’ by Miles Davis playing on your headset, and you’re looking at the app, and you’re and you’re hitting the cue button. You’re just cueing up all these songs, and you’re missing the very song that’s playing. So what I love about putting on a record — and I think a lot of people think feel this way too — is ‘I’m listening to this song, and then I’m going to listen to the song after it.’ I love putting my phone down.”
A sample of how busy the jazz life keeps Di Maria: Last Thursday he played standards at Zinc’s new weekly back-room series. (See above video for a sample.) He played originals the following night at Three Sheets. Tuesday night he had scheduled a Jazz Underground show at Cafe Nine featuring New York trombonist David Gibson. He has gigs scheduled this weekend at Middeltown’s Conspiracy and Norwalks’s Brass & Bone.
And then it’s back to the classroom: He’s starting his 13th year as the music teacher at Truman School in the Hill. He helps the students — more than half “English-language learners“, many of them immigrants, including a sizaeable contingent from Afghanistanand Pakistan — access the universal language of rhythm and drumming. He loves the gig.
At Truman, he follows his parents’ example of public service.
It wasn’t until his mid-thirties that he discovered he also followed his father’s musical example, contrary to his own sense of having forged a different path.
“I was 35 years old when I found out my dad played. I mean, not professionally, but he played a lot, and he played in these Italian social clubs and stuff. He never told me. I found out he played way more than I thought he did.”
Click on the below video to watch the full conversation with trumpeter and Jazz Underground organizer Nick Di Maria, including about how a young trumpeter with the same name (except no space between “Di” and “Maria”) has moved on to his turf. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.
