Steppin' Out: "THE KING OF SCHLEP" LANDS AT BIRDLAND
I have savored Vince Giordano and his Nighthawks in a plethora of places all around this town for years, including my own home court, the Park Avenue Plaza building at 55 East 52nd Street, where Vince played my bookshop, Chartwell Booksellers’, Holiday Tea at Three dances for many, many Decembers, going back to 1986. “The King of Schlep” (Vince’s self-appellation) has always been a nomad, truckin’ his big string bass, his big bass sax (the man is one big basso profundo), plus tuba, to whatever club has next given him and his band semi-permanent residency. Some were dumps, some were dives, some were perfectly decent. To hear Vince tell it, though, Birdland, where he has lately landed, seems like home at last. The room (the downstairs Birdland Theater) is clean, the bathrooms are too, and the sound is even cleaner, with an actual sound guy at the controls. Dinner is served to Vince and the band pre-show, and the paycheck is waiting after, and clears without trouble. Vince Giordano is content.
The night I saw him, Birdland Theater was just about packed, with lots of tourists (some constituting whole multi-generational families), and more than a few non-tourists, seemingly; the mean-age skewing somewhat younger than the usual antediluvian ancients (like me). A nice crowd. And Vince played to it.
What Birdland Theater lacks is a dance floor; a decided deficiency, since the Nighthawks are, ostensibly, a dance band (because that is what the bands of the 1920s and 1930s all were). I missed the sight and sense of people dancing to Vince and his Nighthawks in a club setting. What transpires at Birdland Theater is a kind of recital, which makes its own kind of sense, since Vince’s band book is a repository of vintage arrangements unlike any other; encyclopedic, if not symphonic, in scope. All of these charts physically occupy an entire separate house next door to Vince’s own home out in Brooklyn. I’ve seen it; a museum of music sheets. Whatever chart Vince plucks from the stacks for his band to kick around live is a true source of wonderment, both for loving aficionados, and slumming novices just out on the town. The Maestro plays this up by literally heaving new arrangements at his bandsmen throughout the night, with paper flying in all directions, the guys literally groping and grabbing for their parts before sight-reading them cold. Show-offs.
Vince’s selections for his first set this night included the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra’s Will Hudson arrangement of “White Heat,” a staple of Nighthawks repertoire; Bix and Tram’s version of the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s “Ostrich Walk,” another staple; Louis Armstrong’s iconic Hot Five rendering of “West End Blues” (the impossible solo handled with aplomb by Jon-Erik Kellso); also Louis’ Hot Five take on “Big Butter and Egg Man;” Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s very own “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and Fletcher Henderson’s “Stampede,” one of my absolute favorite Nighthawks showpieces.
The evening’s wild card turned out to be “It’s the Talk of the Town,” as the Fletcher Henderson band recorded it in 1933 featuring a simmering tenor sax solo by Coleman Hawkins that anticipated his revolutionary “Body and Soul” to come in 1939. Vince credited his long (long!)standing tenor saxophonist and arrangement reconstructor, the extraordinary Mark Lopeman, with pushing him to add “It’s the Talk of the Town” to the Nighthawks book. Lopeman has the astounding ability to transcribe entire arrangements solely by ear right off the wax (or vinyl, or disc, or whatever the heck Mark employs these days as his source). Mark also played the Hawkins solo, sublimely.
I don’t care where you may wander, you ain’t gonna hear “It’s the Talk of the Town,” circa 1933, played better than Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks played it at Birdland.
Or, in fact, at all.