Jazz Articles about Vince Giordano

The Bix Centennial All-Stars: Celebrating Bix!

by Nicholas F. Mondello
September 21, 2023

Cornetist Leon Bismark “Bix" Beiderbecke, while certainly heavily influenced by Louis Armstrong, developed his own highly stylized way of playing and improvising jazz. One wonders what musical highlights might have been accomplished had he lived beyond his 28 years. Celebrating Bix!, originally released in 2003 as a single CD album, adds selections which, due to size constraints, did not make the original release, but they all certainly “make it" here as a double CD and vinyl release. What ...

The Bix Centennial All Stars: Celebrating Bix!

by Jack Bowers
September 14, 2023

Here's a new album by the Bix Centennial All Stars honoring the legacy of the renowned cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Sort of. Actually, most of the music on Celebrating Bix! was recorded and released in March 2003, the actual centenary of Beiderbecke's birth in Davenport, Iowa. This expanded twentieth anniversary edition includes a trio of songs not released at that time owing to limited space, and has been reissued on two CDs instead of one. Having said that, ...

Vince Giordano at Iguana

by Nick Catalano
May 21, 2015

If you go to Iguana on 54th St. and sit down on a Monday or Tuesday evening to dine on some sensible Mexican food you can also do some time traveling. When the Nighthawks hit at 8:00pm you won't have any trouble imagining that it is 1925 and you are in a speakeasy at the musical height of the Jazz Age. Hot tune after hot tune (some titles you won't recognize even if you're a maven) are performed so flawlessly ...

Vince Giordano: New York, NY, August 14, 2012

by Andrew J. Sammut
September 5, 2012

Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks Sofia's Restaurant New York, NY August 14, 2012 Vince Giordano receives well-deserved attention for the twenties and thirties repertoire he's brought to the radio on A Prairie Home Companion, films such as 2008's Revolutionary Road and 2004's The The Aviator, and most recently the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, for which Giordano and his band the Nighthawks received a Grammy. Coverage also mentions Giordano's home, full of records, ...

Vince Giordano: Toe-Tapping and Timeless

by Andrew J. Sammut
January 13, 2011

Welcome to the inaugural column “Jazz That Scratches, Swings and Pops We've all heard King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke on the Smithsonian Jazz Collection. We know the names because they're “important," but do we ever listen because they're just plain good? What about Papa Celestin, Red Nichols or Jabbo Smith? Not exactly names jumping out of the radio or iTunes. Save for a precocious thesis or specialty store, the musicians ...

Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks at Club Cache, NYC

by Daniel Kassell
May 24, 2008

Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks Club Cache at Sofia's Restaurant, Edison Hotel (downstairs) New York City May 5, 2008

Sofia's Restaurant, Club Cache at 221 W. 46th Street, NYC last saw music of this ilk--improvised jazz instrumentalists favoring the swing-jazz rhythms of the 1920s and 1930s--so many years ago in this room downstairs under the Edison Hotel hardly anyone remembers. Vince Giordano and his Nighthawks Orchestra will attempt to revive a midtown New York ...

Vince Giordano: Hot Jazz for The Aviator

by David French
January 11, 2005

Vince Giordano, 52, has long been the premier authority on performing 1920s and '30s jazz and popular music. Woody Allen, Madonna, Terry Zweigoff, Garrison Keillor and the New York Philharmonic have all used Giordano and his eleven-piece big band, the Nighthawks, to summon up the days of Busby Berkeley and bathtub gin. Most recently the Nighthawks recorded 22 note-perfect recreations of vintage hits for the soundtrack of The Aviator , Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic. Giordano appears in the film ...