Hide Article Text (OCR)
Young band has sounds of the '20s roaring backROBERT BARRAssociated PressNEW YORK — It was born from an age of rebellion and good times — a sound for the high-stepping and high-living of the Roaring 20s Now that same music evokes images of the bell shaped cloche hats, bathtub gin, the C harleston and Model A Fords.And some members of the New Orleans Nighthawks — the only New York band still playing the tunes that inaugurated the Great Depression — are intoxicated by the musty vapors of nostalgia Not the white-haired guy playing clarinet, though The nostalgia sufferer is Vince Giordano, the whippersnapper on tuba. He just turned 30.“A lot of people think there was ragtime, and then Glenn Miller — so what do you guys play9” says Giordano, whose 10-piece band works one night a week in a crowded Upper East Side club They play big band music, the music that was pioneered by Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and thousands of forgotten musicians.And they pound out such ageless tunes as I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby, Button Up Your Overcoat and Basin Street Blues Giordano thinks that 1928 was THE year “Bix was making his best records, and Whiteman sounded great, and Louie was playing with his first big bands around then, he said. “Everything was going like gangbusters ’“Everybody was gay and drinking and every night was New Year’s Eve, until the crash came,'* adds Clarence Hutchenrider, who started playing clarinet Six decades ago in Waco, Texas If you don’t remember Hutchenrider. you might remember Smoke Bings, the signature tune of the Casaloma Band The clarinet part, from 1931-43. was his.By that time. Hutchenrider had pushed into the “swing era. following a pop musician s preference for novelty.“Sometimes it’s a joy,” he says of his work with the Nighthawks. “Sometimes I’d rather play another style.” Hutchenrider, who played the music when it was new, remembers the youthful impulse to explore, to play the latest sound; Giordano, who heard the music when it was old, talks of its “charm and “nostalgia.”His grandmother’s gramophone, and her collection of “everything from King Oliver to Caruso,” introduced Giordano to the era at age five. She stopped buying records in the mid-1930s, he says —about where his interest in pop music ends The generation gap evaporates on the downbeat, as when Hutchenrider takes the first solo in a raucous runthrough of Indian. The sound is punchy and raw —the insistent rhythm driven by tuba, cymbal and banjo.“It’s so old, it’s new,” Giordano says, explaining the mix of young and old who come to listen, and to improvise some steps to the bouncy beat. “The majority of people here on Tuesdays remember from Glenn Miller on.”Heard live, the music has a bite missing in the tinny recordings and muted movie soundtracks in which the music is most often heard today.The Nighthawk sound is the fruit of Giordano’s archaeology. He has 6,000 original band arrangements in his ever-growing files, and perhaps half as many records, he says.“Sometimes I have to play the recordings for the guys to show how the older bands used to play these arrangements,” Giordano says “I've run across drummers who worked with King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton They can’t play in that style any longer. They’ve grown out of it.”When the band was formed, he also checked the rosters of union musicians, seeing which veterans of the ’20s were still living, and inviting them to join Now, however, the band is mostly vounger men.
Newspaper Details
Panama News Herald
Panama City, Florida, US
Thu, Jun 17, 1982
Page 56
Full Page
Clipped by
Albert H.
NY, USA 10 May 2019
Other Publications Near Panama City, Florida
Panama City Pilot
Panama City News Herald Sunday
Panama City News Herald
Panama News Herald
Panama City News
