Andy Stein: Renaissance, Rock, Schubert, and the Nighthawks

Andy Stein will never forget that day in 1979. “I was walking through a street fair in New York and heard the Manhattan Rhythm Kings playing on a flatbed truck. When they took a break, I said ‘You guys are great. But you need a hot fiddle player.’ Brian Nalepka, their bassist, told me, ‘We don’t need a fiddle player, but Vince Giordano does.’” And ever since, Andy’s been the violinist with Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks.

Andy grew up in New York in a family of accomplished classical musicians. His aunt, Lillian Fuchs, was a famous violist who taught at The Julliard School. “When I was three,” he said, “she shoved a fiddle under my chin and said, ‘It looks good, but wait till he’s five.’ So when I was five, I took a few lessons from a neighbor.

“By age six I was getting a little more serious, taking two lessons a week from Dorothy Minty, an old friend of my dad’s, who had moved to New York to teach at Juilliard under Louis Persinger. I studied with her until I was 14. “Eventually I played second fiddle when she came over to play quartets. Chamber music was a big part of my musical growth.”

But soon, classical music wasn’t his only interest. He got into folk music during summers at Camp Killooleet in Vermont, which was run by John Seeger—Pete’s older brother. Then Andy heard a Folkways record called Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, and began playing old-time fiddle tunes. In the winters, he honed that technique at weekly jams at Alan Block’s sandal shop in Greenwich Village.

“In high school I went crazy for Renaissance music,” he said. “Built a harpsichord, quit the violin for a year, and picked up the viola da gamba. When I went to conservatory, I had to get out of New York because of my family: I was the bad boy who played other kinds of music.”

He majored in violin at the University of Michigan, but also performed with a bluegrass band that recorded for Fortune Records in nearby Detroit.

There in Michigan, Andy was one of the founders of the band Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen and moved to California with them. His bandmate Billy C. Farlow made cassettes from his record collection, that the band would listen to on the road. They included tracks by Django Reinhardt, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Bob Wills.

“We were mainly a rock ‘n’ roll band,” said Andy, “but we listened to and played a lot of different kinds of music, from Chicago blues to classic country & western and early jazz. When the Cody band played rockabilly, though, there was no use beating up on my violin. So I started playing one-note solos on the tenor sax.”

For a while, Andy played in the Bay Area Dixieland combo Golden Age Jazz Band, subbing for tuba player Walter Yost on the baritone sax, and playing an occasional violin feature. The band included many Turk Murphy alumni including Dick Oxtot, Jim Goodwin and Bob Helm.

In the mid-1970s, Andy went to L.A., played a little with Bob Dylan, and took saxophone lessons with Artie Drellinger.

“In L.A. I wrote three film scores for Roger Corman, the king of low-budget horror movies,” he said. “Then a producer hired me to score National Lampoon Goes to the Movies. For the first time, I had a real budget, got a real fee, and recorded with a real orchestra. After three days’ release, though, the film was pulled from theaters and sold to HBO.

“Later I was hired to write a theme song in the style of ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ for a movie called Jaws 3: People 0. It’s called ‘I Love a Shark’ and it became the first release on Hannibal records. Then it was banned in the US and the UK for suggestive lyrics. I also arranged ‘New York, New York’ for the claymation film of Mayor [Ed] Koch’s rendition of the song. It won an Oscar for Animated Short in 1984.”

In the early 1970s Asleep at the Wheel was, in Andy’s words, “a Western Swing band without a regular fiddle player. For their first album, Coming Right At Ya, they hired Johnny Gimble, Buddy Spicher, and me. I played on their first five albums and got a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental 1978, with ‘One O‘Clock Jump.’”

Eventually, Andy returned to his home town, where he works in the classical, pop and vintage jazz fields, composing and arranging classical and jazz, performing on Broadway and in orchestras and chamber groups. He wrote an opera with Garrison Keillor’s libretto, and created a symphony from Schubert’s famous string quartet “Death and the Maiden,” which is used in Alexander Ekman’s ballet Cacti, and has so far been performed some 500 times, worldwide.

His arrangement of “Junk” for string quartet is the opening track on Sir Paul McCartney’s 1997 album, Working Classical. “Diana Krall recommended me to play jazz fiddle on his standards album Kisses on the Bottom. On ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon,’ I play a hot solo and then trade fours with Paul, who’s whistling.”

His solos can also be heard on the soundtracks for several Disney films; a few of Ken Burns’s documentaries; also in the movies Cotton Club and The Red Violin, and most recently Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon where he appears on film about three hours in.

For 22 years, Andy was on coast-to-coast radio, playing violin and sax in the house band for Garrison Keillor’s weekly show A Prairie Home Companion where he had the honor of performing with James Taylor, Itzhak Perlman, Maya Angelou, and many others. Andy figures prominently in Robert Altman’s film about the show.

How does Andy transition between classical music and hot jazz?

“I don’t know. Most decent jazz musicians do that every day. I guess sometimes you’d want it to sound ‘classical’ and at other times you just want it to sound good. Apparently, Coleman Hawkins used to listen to string quartets. The main thing,” Andy insists, “is to listen to others while you play: a skill necessary for jazz and any other group music.”

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Sidebar 1: Andy and the Giants

Of the many musical influences in his career, Andy was perhaps most inspired by recordings of Joe Venuti and Stéphane Grappelli, the founding giants of jazz violin.

“If you asked me what, in my technique, I would attribute to Venuti and Grappelli, I’d say the most important is that they both had a solid classical technique. Venuti had a particularly great bow-arm.” Andy also cites “my wonderful teacher Charles Avsharian, who pointed out that Venuti plays with more vertical fingers for clarity, and Grappelli plays with a laid back left hand, which creates a warmer sound.”

While the records Grappelli made with Django Reinhardt in the 1930s are legendary, Andy says “Some of my favorite Grappelli recordings are from after the War, from their sessions in Rome in 1949, when they got back together.”

Andy has cut two albums in tribute to Venuti.

Goin’ Places features guitarists Howard Alden and Frank Vignola; Ken Peplowski and Chuck Wilson on clarinets and other reeds; pianist Dick Wellstood; Tony Garnier on string bass; drummer Arnold Kinsella, Jr.; Vince Giordano on bass sax and string bass, and Andy on violin, tenor sax and baritone sax.

Doin’ Things has guitarists Martin Wheatley and Matt Munisteri; Dan Levinson on clarinet, alto, C-melody and baritone saxes; pianist David Boeddinghaus; Vince Giordano on bass sax, string bass, and percussion; and Andy on violin and vocals.

Both albums can be downloaded from Apple Music & Spotify.

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Sidebar 2: That Weird Violin!

Invented at the turn of the last century, it’s called a Stroh violin, after its inventor: a German electrical engineer named Johannes Matthias Augustus Stroh. The amplifying horn isn’t brass—it’s aluminum. Strohs were widely used in the early years of “mechanical” recordings, before the invention of the microphone.

“Vince [Giordano] found it somewhere, antiquing, and now I play it at least once in every Nighthawks set. It looks better than it sounds, to the modern ear: it’s very midrange-y. But it does evoke the sound of an old record—which is a sound we love.”

Andy and Nighthawks pianist Peter Yarin like to make up palindromes. Peter wrote “A ham, a yam, a Yamaha.” Andy is proudest of “Short solos on tuba, but no solo Strohs.”