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Dan Levinson Palomar June 21 by Neal Siegal

Dan Levinson’s Palomar Jazz Band with Molly Ryan
Sunday, June 6, 2021 at 2pm

LIVE STREAM

Dan Levinson brings us his Palomar Jazz Band for this streaming-only concert. As usual, Dan is assembling the cream of New York City's flourishing hot jazz scene, resulting in a magical chemistry replete with creativity and excitement. These performers blend the raucous, freewheeling sounds of the Jazz Age with the alluring, hypnotic beat of the Swing Era.

Dan Levinson has included such names as Mel Tormé, Wynton Marsalis and Dick Hyman on his roster of musical associates. A Los Angeles native, Dan has been based in New York since 1983, although his busy schedule often takes him across the continent and around the world. He has performed in Brazil with filmmaker Woody Allen’s band, as well as in Japan, Iceland, Latvia and eighteen European countries. From 1990 to 2002 Dan toured with singer/guitarist Leon Redbone. Since 1993 he has been a member of Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks, with whom he has appeared at Carnegie Hall, on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion radio program. Dan’s successful Benny Goodman tributes have been presented both on the East Coast with James Langton’s New York All-Star Big Band - NYC’s preeminent swing orchestra - and throughout Germany with Andrej Hermlin’s Swing Dance Orchestra. Dan has recorded over 150 CDs, including nine under his own name. He can be heard on the soundtracks to the films The Cat’s Meow, Ghost World, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, as well as on virtually all of the newly-recorded music used on the soundtrack of the Grammy Award-winning HBO television series Boardwalk Empire, which ran from 2010 to 2014. His most recent TSJS appearance was a streamed in August 2020.

“A critic’s favorite” – so proclaims author and music writer for The Wall Street Journal Will Friedwald in reference to Molly Ryan (Mrs. Levinson). He goes on to say, “Molly swings the melody – as well as the words – without affectation of any kind. She brings a straight-ahead innocence and total believability to the music that refuses to admit that sixty or seventy years of distractions have ever happened. She sounds worldly wise beyond her years, wonderfully gentle and lyrical.” Indeed, Molly’s silvery voice and lush, elegant vocal style evoke the big band singers of the 1930s and breathe new life into familiar old standards. Molly took part in a spectacular re-creation of Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, as well as at the 2004 JVC Jazz Festival’s centennial tribute to Jimmy Dorsey at New York City’s famed jazz club Birdland. She has headlined at Birdland for the club’s Sunday evening showcase, “Jazz Party” and has performed there with James Langton’s New York All-Star Big Band, as well as with her own band in a critically acclaimed tribute to Mae West.

“Eloquent trumpet prodigy” Mike Davis (Wall Street Journal) has a voice beyond his years on his instrument. His playing is imbued with the sounds of Prohibition-era speakeasies, Hoovervilles of the depression, and glittering jazz palaces of the swing era, creating a timeless cocktail of American music. A recent graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, Mike now appears regularly around New York City with Dandy Wellington and his band, Emily Asher’s Garden Party, Terry Waldo, Dan Levinson, and many other traditional jazz and swing bands. A regular at the celebrated jam session at Mona’s Bar, Mike is among the vanguard of young musicians bringing traditional jazz to the forefront of the NYC music scene.

Trombonist Jim Fryer, who has also appeared at TSJS with the Connecticut-based Galvanized Jazz Band, made his professional debut at the age of 16 in the Boston area. He later joined the Paradise City Jazz Band in Northampton, Massachusetts, and played many festivals with them. Since that time, Jim has toured internationally every year, performed on dozens of recordings, made TV appearances, and played a variety of theaters and concert halls throughout New England. Jim first visited England in 1988 and has returned every year since then with Classic Jazz Epochs and Jeff Barnhart, Paradise City JB, the Hot Cats, and as a solo performer with the UK’s best musicians, including Humphrey Lyttleton, Kenny Baker and Digby Fairweather. Now living in New York, Jim is one of the busiest brass men in the city, a featured performer with the Titan Hot Seven Jazz Band and Vince Giordano's Nighthawks. In his travels he has shared the stage with Doc Cheatham, Kenny Davern, Butch Thompson, Dave Brubeck, Slide Hampton, Milt Jackson and Rosemary Clooney.

Pianist Dalton Ridenhour, who performed solo for TSJS in 2019, has degrees from both the Berklee College of Music and The Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Harold Danko, Joanne Brackeen, Danilo Perez, Joe Lovano and Hal Crook. Dalton performs locally and internationally with various groups including Vince Giordano and The Nighthawks, The Lovestruck Balladeers, Dan Levinson's Roof Garden Jass Band, Naomi and Her Handsome Devils, Mike Davis and The New Wonders, Goodbye Picasso, and Mona's Hot Four. Festival appearances have included The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival, The West Coast Ragtime Festival, The Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival, and The Blind Boone Ragtime and Early Jazz Festival.

Kevin Dorn has been one of the busiest drummers in traditional jazz for years. He is dedicated to carrying on the tradition of the great ensemble drummers such as Cliff Leeman, Dave Tough, George Wettling, Buzzy Drootin and Morey Feld — drummers who played for the benefit of the band and who were masters of time. This commitment and intensity has led to steady work with such stellar musicians as Dan Barrett, Ed Polcer, Dick Hyman, Allan Vaché, Bob Wilber, Warren Vaché, Dan Levinson, Mark Shane, Terry Blaine, Randy Sandke, Banu Gibson, Jon-Erik Kellso and Randy Reinhart. From 2002 to 2004, Kevin was the drummer for the Jim Cullum Jazz Band, the nation’s foremost traditional jazz group, appearing on the Cullum band’s weekly public radio show, Riverwalk: Live at The Landing.

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