NJJS Presents Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks at MPAC

Fresh off of winning a 2012 Grammy Award for their score for the HBO hit series Boardwalk Empire, the New Jersey Jazz Society presents Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks for an “Afternoon of Jazz” at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown on Sunday, May 6. Enjoy a blast from the big band past with the band that is renowned for their commitment to preserving and authentically presenting 1920s and ’30s jazz and popular music.

In more than 30 years as a bandleader Giordano has focused on recreating the sounds of early jazz and popular music. “I just love the energy of the early jazz,” says Giordano. “I wanted to recapture some of that.” He developed his expertise on the saxophone, bass and tuba, but he is best known as leader of the vintage band the Nighthawks, and their authentic realizations of earlier jazz performance styles.

Also a big band historian, Giordano has a collection of more than 60,000 original band scores that he draws from for the band’s celebrated performances — which have been described as “An erupting wellspring of euphoria…” by New York Times critic Stephen Holden.

The band — originally known as the New Orleans Nighthawks — was formed in 1976. Early appearances with Leon Redbone and on NPR’s Prairie Home Companion, and lending his talents to Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Cotton Club, led to Vince’s working with Dick Hyman on half a dozen Woody Allen film soundtracks, including on screen as a bass player in Sean Penn’s band in Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. The band was featured in Gus Van Sant’s film Finding Forrester, in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd and most recently in Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road.