The road-show documentary There’s a Future in the Past: The Man and the Band Who Make the Jazz Age Come Alive captures the syncopated heartbeat of the 1920s and 1930s, as embodied in the engaging, foot-tapping big band jazz performed by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. The film, directed by Dave Davidson and Amber Edwards for Hudson West Productions, is under distribution by First Run Features.
The documentary is an official selection at the Carmel International Film Festival in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA (October 19-23) and at the 2016 Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, IN (October 20-30).
In There’s a Future in the Past, we see a committed, athletic Vince Giordano hauling a huge array of eccentric period instruments to his standing Manhattan restaurant gig, a Connecticut Theater full of appreciative fans, and to appearances on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. The musicians, a hand-picked group of elite and dedicated New York sidemen, call him “crazy” (but admiringly so) for persisting in this superhuman effort, but Vince assures us that using authentic gear is necessary to re-create the actual sound of the Jazz Age.
His current Monday and Tuesday night gig is at Iguana, a Mexican restaurant at 240 West 54th Street, off Times Square. The Nighthawks play in the upstairs lounge, where they squeeze the band onto a smallish, tiered stage—and there is a
