Madsen Releases New Album
The Album "Threefold" is Receiving Rave Reviews
Christopher Madsen, DMA, a teaching assistant professor in Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences, released Threefold, a new album of original jazz music, in March 2026.
Madsen, who also serves as Loyola’s Coordinator of Ensembles and Coordinator of Jazz Studies, performs saxophone alongside bassist Clark Sommers, a Grammy Award-winning musician, and drummer Dana Hall. Together, the trio explores eight original compositions that draw on jazz traditions while embracing new sounds, rhythms, and approaches to improvisation.
The three musicians are established figures on Chicago’s vibrant jazz scene, with years of performances and collaborations contributing to the chemistry they bring to the album.
“Professor Madsen exemplifies the strong connection between creative practice and teaching,” said Peter J. Schraeder, PhD, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Through his work as a performer, composer, and educator, he brings professional experience and a deep understanding of jazz to the Loyola community. Our students benefit from learning with faculty who remain active in their fields and can connect classroom instruction with the realities of professional practice.”
Threefold marks a creative shift for the trio. Their first album, The Trio Book, released in 2023, focused on interpreting classic jazz pieces and lesser-known standards. For the new release, Madsen and Sommers contributed original compositions that give the musicians room to build on their shared knowledge of jazz while developing their own musical identities.
“Originally, I imagined this trio’s role to be more about addressing canonical material, exploring lesser-known jazz pieces and standards,” Madsen said. “When I began thinking about the possibility of writing music for the trio, the floodgates opened and Clark and I began brainstorming how to do that.”
Across the album, the musicians explore a range of rhythmic and harmonic possibilities, drawing on their deep familiarity with one another to balance composed material with improvisation.
Madsen describes that balance as central to the group’s approach. “When writing new music, we attempt to balance our reverence for the masters with a desire to fully express ourselves in the contemporary jazz language,” he said. “We aim to provide templates for the group to be creative and have fun over.”
In a review of Threefold on ChicagoJazz.com, Jeff Cebulski praised the range of styles on the album and the rapport among the musicians, describing the trio as “a formidable jazz unit.”
Before joining Loyola, Madsen served as jazz program director at Midwest Young Artists in Highwood, Illinois and has also taught at Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Listen to Threefold and learn more about Madsen.
About the College of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1870, the College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest and largest of Loyola University Chicago’s 13 schools and colleges, serving as the academic home for nearly 8,000 students (roughly 50 percent of Loyola’s total student population). It is academically diverse with twenty academic departments that span an array of intellectual pursuits, ranging from the natural sciences and computational sciences to the humanities, the social sciences, and the fine and performing arts. It is also highly interdisciplinary with thirty-one interdisciplinary programs and seven interdisciplinary centers, including the mission-centric Jesuit Heritage Research Center and the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. The College is home to over 450 full-time, award-winning faculty, who are committed to teaching and research excellence. They teach nearly 2,000 classes each semester, including 88 percent of all Core Curriculum classes taken by undergraduate students across the university. They also contribute to eleven doctoral programs whose graduates have helped propel Loyola starting in 2025 to R-1 research status (the highest research status a university can achieve). Our students and faculty are engaged internationally at Loyola Rome in Italy, as well as at dozens of university-sponsored study abroad and research sites around the world. Home to the departments that anchor the university’s Core Curriculum, the College seeks to prepare all of Loyola’s students to think critically, to engage the world of the 21st century at ever-deepening levels, and to become caring and compassionate individuals. Our faculty, staff, and students view service to others not just as one option among many, but as a constitutive dimension of their very being. In the truest sense of the Jesuit ideal, our graduates strive to be “individuals for others.”