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Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks

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Music · USVince Giordano and the NighthawksBirdland Theater · New York

from USD 24.91 Music · USVince Giordano and the NighthawksBirdland Theater · New York

from USD 24.91

The profile · researched 26 September 2026

Fifty years of hot jazz, two shows a night, and a crate of two thousand charts

Vince Giordano has led the Nighthawks since 1976, playing the dance-band and hot jazz repertoire of the 1920s and 1930s as working music rather than museum pieces. In autumn 2026 the eleven-piece is deep into a Monday-and-Tuesday residency at the Birdland Theater in Manhattan, with dates listed through to January 2027.

Brooklyn, a wind-up Victrola and a union card at fourteen

Vincent James Giordano was born in Brooklyn on 11 March 1952 and dates the whole enterprise to the age of five, when he came across 78rpm records of 1920s dance music on a wind-up phonograph at his grandmother's. He moved from violin to tuba, string bass and eventually bass saxophone, joined the musicians' union at fourteen, and was working professionally on string bass and bass sax by fifteen.

What separated him from other revivalists was that he went to the source while the source was still alive. He studied arranging with Bill Challis, the man who wrote for Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman and scored Bix Beiderbecke's best-known sides, and worked with the tuba and bass player Joe Tarto, another survivor of the period. That apprenticeship is audible: the band plays from written arrangements in the idiom of the time rather than sketching head charts over old tunes.

The Nighthawks were formed in 1976, originally billed as the New Orleans Nighthawks, and have worked New York venues ever since. Alongside the band Giordano built an archive: by his own count more than 64,000 band arrangements, plus silent-film scores, piano rolls, 78s and the machines to play them. The library is the band's instrument as much as the horns are.

Screen work, a Grammy, and a shelf of records

The Nighthawks became the default call whenever an American production needed period music played properly. Their credits run from Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club through Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You and Sweet and Lowdown to Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, Michael Mann's Public Enemies, Revolutionary Road, Carol, HBO's Bessie and The Knick, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Irishman, and Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023, where Giordano appears on screen as a radio bandleader.

The work that changed their visibility was HBO's Boardwalk Empire. Giordano was asked to transcribe or adapt material by bands such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and the Nighthawks appear on every volume of the show's soundtrack. Boardwalk Empire Volume 1 took the Grammy for best compilation soundtrack for visual media in 2012; Giordano has said he found out by telephone while driving home from a gig, and that what he valued was younger listeners hearing the music at all. Volumes 2 and 3 followed.

Away from the screen the discography includes Quality Shout!, Cotton Club Revisited, Cheek to Cheek, Moonlight Serenade, The Birth of Rhapsody in Blue, the Cole Porter collection It's De-Lovely, a Challis-centred set titled The Goldkette Project, I'd Rather Lead a Band with Loudon Wainwright III, and two volumes released under the title 78 RPM. In 2016 Giordano was inducted into the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame in the jazz category. A feature documentary, Vince Giordano: There's a Future in the Past, opened in cinemas in 2017 and remains available on disc and streaming.

Three rooms, one weekly habit

The residency, not the tour bus, is the shape of this band's working life, and the address has changed only a handful of times in four decades. For five years the Nighthawks held Mondays and Tuesdays at Sofia's, in the Hotel Edison on West 47th Street, playing from eight until eleven. Sofia's closed in August 2013 and left an eleven-piece band with a fortnight to find a home.

They found one upstairs at Iguana, a Mexican restaurant on West 54th Street, opening there on Monday 9 September 2013 and keeping the same two nights a week for years afterwards. The saxophonist Adrian Cunningham, writing about his stint in the section in December 2020, described the mechanics of the job: no rehearsal, each player with a crate holding more than 2,000 charts patched with sticky tape and pencilled over by decades of previous readers, and Giordano calling numbers at speed from the front.

The band has since moved to the Birdland Theater, the downstairs room at Birdland on West 44th Street, where the Monday-and-Tuesday pattern carried on and the sets moved earlier, to 5.30pm and 8.30pm.

Where they stand now

As of late September 2026 the Nighthawks are in the middle of an uninterrupted Birdland run. The band's own calendar lists Mondays and Tuesdays from September 2026 straight through October, November and December and into 4 and 5 January 2027, with two shows on each date. Songkick counted 72 listed performances, all at the one venue, with the next on Monday 28 September 2026.

Tickets sit in the region of $25 to $46, rising to about $56 for the late-December shows, and the room admits ages ten and over. The holiday dates on 21, 22 and 29 December 2026 shift to 7pm and 9.30pm rather than the usual early start. Earlier in 2026 the band also played Birdland on 10 March and 19 May, which is to say the residency has been continuous rather than seasonal.

Outside the club they still take the occasional civic booking where the music does what it was written for. On 12 June 2025 they played the free Dance Floor at Josie Robertson Plaza as part of Lincoln Center's Summer for the City, with a vintage foxtrot lesson from Heather Gehring and Lou Brockman at 7pm before the band came on at 7.30pm. Town Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival are all on the longer record.

The band on the stand

The line-up is eleven or so players drawn from a wider pool of regulars and deputies, which is why no two nights match. Reviews from 2024 name Jon-Erik Kellso and Joseph Boga on trumpets, Sam Chess on trombone, Dan Levinson, Will Anderson and Mark Lopeman on reeds, Andy Stein on baritone saxophone and violin, Arnt Arntzen on guitar and banjo, Peter Yarin on piano, and Paul Wells on drums and percussion. Giordano fronts it in a dinner jacket, singing and switching between bass saxophone, tuba and string bass.

Period detail extends to the hardware. Marilyn Lester, writing in May 2024, singled out the Stroh violin, the horn-amplified instrument built for acoustic recording studios, in use on the stand. The same review described the ensemble as bright and tight and always in the pocket, at tempos from slow ballad to very fast indeed.

Repertoire ranges from tunes a general audience will recognise, among them Chicago, Body and Soul and Yes! We Have No Bananas, to material that exists almost nowhere else in live performance: Jazz Lips, Hot and Heavy, Triggeration, Freeze and Melt, Sugar Foot Stomp. Giordano attaches a short piece of history to most of it, which is the part reviewers tend to say stops the evening becoming a costume exercise.

The show, now

The current show is the Birdland Theater residency: Mondays and Tuesdays, two separate sets a night at 5.30pm and 8.30pm, each running roughly 75 minutes, with a small stage holding eleven players in dinner jackets, music stands and crates of original charts. There is no support act and no opener - Giordano fronts it himself, singing, switching between bass saxophone, tuba and string bass, and calling tunes by chart number rather than title, at speed, without a fixed setlist. A typical night runs fifteen or more pieces mixing familiar material such as Chicago, Body and Soul and Yes! We Have No Bananas with obscurities like Jazz Lips, Triggeration and Sugar Foot Stomp, each introduced with a brief piece of history. Period instruments appear, including a horn-amplified Stroh violin. Reviewers in May 2024 called the band unreal and unstoppable, and bright and tight and always in the pocket; the sets sell out regularly, and tickets run about $25 to $46, rising for the late-December dates. Ages ten and over.

Researched from en.wikipedia.org · vincegiordano.com · vincegiordano.com · vincegiordano.com · birdlandjazz.com · songkick.com · stageandcinema.com · nitelifeexchange.com

Formed: 1976, as the New Orleans Nighthawks
From: New York City; Giordano born Brooklyn, 11 March 1952
Genre: Hot jazz and dance-band music of the 1920s and 1930s
Members: Giordano (bass saxophone, tuba, string bass, vocals) leading an eleven-piece; regulars include Jon-Erik Kellso, Dan Levinson, Andy Stein, Arnt Arntzen, Peter Yarin, Paul Wells
Key records: Boardwalk Empire Volumes 1-3, Quality Shout!, The Goldkette Project, 78 RPM Vols 1 & 2
Awards: Grammy, best compilation soundtrack for visual media, 2012 (Boardwalk Empire Volume 1); Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame, 2016
Residency: Birdland Theater, New York - Mondays and Tuesdays, listed through 5 January 2027
On film: Documentary: Vince Giordano: There's a Future in the Past (2017)

In the news

Vince Giordano and the NighthawksTime Out · 15 Mar 2012