Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks @ Bond 45 - New York City Article

Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks
Bond 45
221 West 46th Street
(212) 869-4545
Mondays & Tuesdays (ongoing)

I’m delighted to report that the greatest band in New York - if not the world - has found a post-pandemic home. Ironically, it’s the same geographical location (under the Edison Hotel) where they played 10 years ago, but the room has been much improved. The downstairs space, now known as Bond 45, has enjoyed a miraculous facelift. Now it’s not only no longer a dump, it’s actually become one of the most elegant rooms in town - a venue where you’ll actually want to wear a tie or even a tux. It’s a fitting home for the music of the Nighthawks, sophisticated and yet funky, with all the energy and vitality that made the 1920s roar. I’ve written thousands of words about Mr. Giordano and the band over the years (particularly for The Wall Street Journal and the old New York Sun), but here’s a slightly edited blurb from circa 2017.

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A 40-plus year institution in Manhattan, Vince Giordano has been playing the music of the 1920s and ‘30s- jazz and the Great American Songbook - now for twice as long as those decades actually lasted. Wherever the Nighthawks play, it’s invariably the greatest hang in town: for three hours, you get to listen (or dance, if you’ve had enough to drink first) to the music of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke - as well as Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, and George Gershwin (their foxtrot arrangement of the “Rhapsody in Blue” is a must-hear) - played with dynamic energy and unflagging inspiration. The band’s key soloists - trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso, trombonist Jim Fryer, clarinetist and saxophonist Dan Levinson - all capture the spirit of the era while subjugating it to their own personalities, taking their cue from the relentless drive of their indefatigable leader, who often seems to be playing all three of his bass instruments (bass saxophone, tuba, and acoustic string bass) at once while simultaneously singing and spieling about the music’s history. You can see and hear the Nighthawks in over a dozen movies, including all the recent period-set films of Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, as well as all five seasons of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (which yielded a Grammy-winning soundtrack album for Mr. Giordano) and Amber Edwards’s sparkling documentary, Vince Giordano: There's a Future in the Past. But the real experience is to catch them in person on a Monday or Tuesday evening, where you never know who (from Elvis Costello to Michael Feinstein to Mel Brooks) will drop in, apart from the ghosts of Gershwin and Ellington, who are already in regular attendance.

for more info and reservations click here

illustration by Joe Busam

(Special Thanks to Nighthawks producer, Steve Garrin.)