[Dixielandjazz] Vince Giordano - NY Times, Earl Wilson

[Robert Ringwald]

http://nyti.ms/1cKQ4Sv



Vince Giordano at his Brooklyn home. Filing cabinets there and next door help store his music. Earl Wilson/The New York Times



Vince Giordano owns a home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his music.

He also owns a second home in Brooklyn, where his music lives alone.



“I needed to buy the house next door just to store my ever-growing collection of

music,” said Mr. Giordano, a composer and jazz musician who owns roughly 3,000 piano rolls, 31,000 pieces of sheet music and 60,000 arrangements of big-band songs that were popular from the 1920s through the 1940s. Each paper item is cataloged, kept in a separate envelope and stored in one of the filing cabinets located throughout both of his homes.



“I’m always on the hunt for old music, especially stuff that is now out of print,”

Mr. Giordano said. “I have already cleaned out three old movie theaters, in Buffalo, St. Louis and New Jersey, that used sheet music and band arrangements for stage shows.” “It’s called preservation,” he added.



In the home where Mr. Giordano lives, over 1,000 piano rolls are neatly displayed inside the cubbyholes of a giant wall unit.



“Piano rolls were once a form of entertainment,” he said on a recent afternoon. “People would gather around pianos and have singalongs to the hit tunes of the early days.”



Remnants of those early days were gathered around Mr. Giordano as he sat in his living room alongside entertaining company: a large tuba, a bass saxophone, a string bass and a Steinway player piano from the 1920s. A drum set from that same era hung from the ceiling above a Victrola that has been spinning records for more than a century.



Mr. Giordano later went up to his bedroom and dropped a thick shellac record on a phonograph, literally cranking up a tune called “Sunrise and You” by the Max Fells Della Robbia Orchestra.

“The beauty of this phonograph is that it is all mechanical,” he said proudly. “Even if you lost all electricity, you can still play your record.”



Mr. Giordano, who is 61 and divorced and who speaks with the quiet ease of a priest in a confession booth, is not ashamed to admit that he is married to his profession. “Big-band music, I love it, I have always loved it,” he said. “It comes from a time when people really didn’t have a lot of things; they didn’t have iPhones and computers. They just went out and had a great time, and the music that I play is reflective of that time.”



He soon began fine-tuning arrangements for a one-night performance on Feb. 12 at Town Hall on West 43rd Street in Manhattan. There, Mr. Giordano and his band, the Nighthawks, will honor the 90th anniversary of George Gershwin’s composition “Rhapsody in Blue,” which was introduced on Feb. 12, 1924, at Aeolian Hall, which was also on 43rd Street.

The concert will also feature the music of the composers Irving Berlin, Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern and Zez Confrey.



“It’s one of the great thrills in my life to be able to salute a very important piece of music and all these great composers,” Mr. Giordano said. “ ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is a part of the music that would eventually change the world, as it was the first serious work of a combination of jazz and classical music.”



Mr. Giordano’s band won a Grammy Award in 2011 for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media, on Martin Scorsese’s “Boardwalk Empire,” which appears on HBO.



“I also played the role of a bandleader on Boardwalk who gets to yell out the key word, ‘prohibition,’ ” Mr. Giordano said. “Mr. Scorsese had me shout that word, prohibition, 42 times. I said ‘Mr. Scorsese, please I can’t say it anymore.’ He kept saying, ‘Try it again Vince, keep trying it again.’ ”



Through the years, Mr. Giordano has lent his music and acting talents to a number of other projects, including Francis Ford Coppola’s “Cotton Club” and Mr. Scorsese’s “Aviator,” and he has worked on a half-dozen Woody Allen soundtracks. The Nighthawks, who were formed in 1976, have worked together on the soundtracks of Robert De Niro’s “Good Shepherd” and Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies.”



Mr. Giordano was born in Brooklyn and was 2 when his family moved to Smithtown, on Long Island, where he grew up perfecting the art of playing the bass saxophone, tuba and string bass. He became interested in big-band music when his grandmother let him play records on her Victrola. “The sounds coming out of that old machine, wow,” said Mr. Giordano, suddenly speaking in a higher key. “I was hooked.”



Music became his life — and his obsession. Evidence can be found in the framed photographs that sit atop his coffee tables and cover the walls of his single-family home. They are photos not of family members, but of jazz icons like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, Miles Davis and Benny Goodman. “These are all my gods,” Mr. Giordano said. “I often look up to the heavens and ask them, ‘How am I doing?’ ”



Standing in the basement of his second home, Mr. Giordano pulled a piece of sheet music from a filing cabinet. “Now look at this great piece by Gershwin from 1933; it’s called ‘On and On and On,’” he said. “That pretty much sums up my music collection, my career and big-band music in general: It just goes on and on and on.”



A version of this article appears in print on February 3, 2014, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Big-Band Music Collector Requires a Second House Just to Store His Tunes. 

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-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

"Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours." 
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