New York City’s premier vintage jazz orchestra, Vince Giordano & The Nighthawks, have done very well for themselves by making good music for bad guys—on TV and the movies, that is.
The band won a well-deserved Grammy Award in 2012: Best Compilation for Visual Media for Jazz Age music it created for the Boardwalk Empire Volume 1: Music from the HBO Original Series CD.
As viewers know, Boardwalk Empire’s five seasons chronicle the violent rise of fictional Atlantic City crime czar Nucky Thompson as portrayed by Sopranos alumnus Steve Buscemi. Thompson is loosely based on real-life New Jersey rogue cop and racketeer Nucky Johnson (1883-1968) who did business during Prohibition with gangsters such as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.
Now Giordano and a few of his trusty Nighthawks are making music for another bad guy, Wall Street scammer Bernie Madoff as portrayed by Robert DeNiro in a new HBO movie titled Wizard of Lies.
The 135-minute film directed by Barry Levinson recalls Madoff’s long-running Ponzi scheme which defrauded his clients of billions of dollars from the early 1990s until his arrest in late 2008. The swindle committed by the former non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market is considered the largest financial fraud in U.S. history.
