It's not hard to find examples of jazz records dedicated to great songwriters. Miles Davis recorded an album of Richard Rodgers tunes, Herbie Hancock released an all-Gershwin CD, and The Wee Trio has just put out an album of David Bowie songs. One of these things is not like the others.

Well, so what? More and more jazz artists are bypassing standards and exploring the songs they grew up with. Joshua Redman plays Dylan and The Beatles; Brad Mehldau covers Radiohead. Why shouldn't The Wee Trio play Bowie?

In fact, when the trio plays tunes from the album at Roberts Wesleyan College next week, the choice will seem perfectly logical. On the album, Bowie's songs lend themselves nicely to improvisation. And, in what appears to be a growing trend, the orientation of this young group owes as much to the rock aesthetic as it does to jazz.

It turns out Bowie wasn't the only outside-the-box possibility for exploration. "We wanted to do one composer," says bassist Dan Loomis by phone from his Brooklyn apartment. "We looked at Jimi Hendrix, Gabriel Faur� and Paul Simon, and we decided to do David Bowie."

The album's title, "Ashes to Ashes: A David Bowie Intraspective," is not a misprint. Loomis explains that the group did not use the term "introspective" because that would imply Bowie examining his own music. They coined the word "intraspective" only to find that it was already in the Urban Dictionary with a definition that somehow seemed appropriate: "All of existence happening at once and forever. Usually experienced by means of psychedelics."

Interestingly, on the album, the group avoids Bowie's biggest hits ("Space Oddity," "Life On Mars," "Changes") and instead covers songs like "Queen Bitch," "1984," and "Battle For Britain."

"That was deliberate," says Loomis. "The thing we wanted to avoid was having a sing-along album. The danger with playing music that's really familiar is you know it so well that you can't break away from it. It enables us to have some freedom because it's not so ingrained in our heads."

On past albums The Wee Trio has covered Nirvana's "About A Girl," Aphex Twin's "Avril 14," and Sufjan Stevens' "Flint." One fringe benefit of a Bowie-themed album is it's bound to attract people to shows.

I think people are a little afraid of the word ‘jazz,'" says Loomis. "But once they come to a show they're going to have a good time. It's not so much we're trying to appeal to a ‘rock audience,' but we feel like if they're not jazz fans it's almost better. We're trying to go beyond the jazz audience, but it's more the idea that we feel like we can appeal to everyone."

The group - which also includes vibraphonist James Westfall and drummer Jared Schonig -- tested that appeal in the process of creating the album, asking fans for $5000 on fundraising website Kickstarter. "We were a little hesitant to do Kickstarter, kind of like online begging," says Loomis, "but when we actually got into it we were basically pre-selling albums and t-shirts with no markup." The trio raised $5,500 mostly in small donations.

On the Wee Trio Kickstarter page the first phrase used to describe the band is "post punk," a description that began as a joke a few years ago when the group was setting up its MySpace page. The site asks musicians to place themselves in three different genres.

"We didn't want to pin down what we were doing so we put down Japanese, classical, and post-punk," says Loomis. "But we do try to have that energy. I was watching a lot of Clash videos at the time. You watch that band play and it's just so committed to every second of the two-and-a-half-minute performance of the song. We wanted to have that same sort of energy."

Over the last two decades Brooklyn has become the epicenter of the young-Turk jazz world. So, when two-thirds of the trio --- bassist Loomis and drummer Schonig (sometime collaborators since their days at the Eastman School of Music) --- were seeking a band mate, they didn't have to look far.

"We actually just saw James wheeling his vibraphone down 23rd Street," says Loomis. "He literally lived across the street." After that serendipitous encounter, "the group felt great right away. We were all coming from listening to the same music and approaching it in the same way."

But, in a genre where ensembles are usually named for the leader, why did they call it The Wee Trio? "People always want to identify with personalities in jazz but we felt like [a group name] reflected what was going on in our music," says Loomis. "The way we were playing was democratic. We wanted more of the rock or classical music aesthetic, we wanted people to check out the music in its entirety, its wholeness."

Still, other jazz groups --- The Bad Plus, Sex Mob, Mostly Other People Do the Killing --- have subversive, attention-getting names. The Wee Trio is so...modest.

"We just felt that it was an underused word in the English Language," says Loomis. "The Nintendo WII was coming out then and we were all kind of into it. We liked the sound of it.

"The more esoteric answer is we felt it was revelatory for us to play in a vibraphone trio," says Loomis. "We felt like it was a smaller version of a piano trio because James can play chords but he can also just play one note. Piano trios are always about the piano player, but with the vibraphone we felt it was an agile version of a piano trio."

�An understated name and Bowie-themed album are not the only unconventional things about this group. What other serious jazz players would have their faces painted with rainbows for their album cover, in the style of Bowie on the cover of "Aladdin Sane"?

"We wanted to honor his dedication to the whole conception of all the arts at once," says Loomis. "He was extremely theatrical. We wanted to honor putting the image out there alongside the music."

The Wee Trio

Wednesday, February 8

Cox Hall, Roberts Wesleyan College, 2301 Westside Drive

6:30 p.m. | Free | 594-6008, roberts.edu