Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks
Tuesdays at Birdland, Through January 3

Vince Giordano is usually described as a multi-instrumentalist. During a typical set by the Nighthawks, he’ll switch back and forth between his familiar vintage aluminum string bass fiddle, tuba, and bass saxophone (a gargantuan apparatus — rarely played since the 1920s — that looks as if the tuba and the tenor sax were somehow able to breed).  

Yet the instrument itself doesn’t matter: He’s essentially doing one thing, and that’s leading and propelling the entire 11-man shebang using whatever implement the song calls for. On some tunes he also sings and plays guitar.

Mr. Giordano has just finished the second Tuesday night in a seven-week run at the Birdland Theater. So far, both shows were completely sold out; I was shut out from the opening night and barely able to get a seat for the second. 

The table that I did get was on the extreme house right; while this afforded only a partial view of the band — it could have been Liberace on piano, for all I could see — the good news was that I got an up-close opportunity to experience the remarkable way that Mr. Giordano directs and shapes the music. He’s like one of the heavyweight symphonic conductors, such as Sir Neville Marriner, whose grandson Douglas happens to be the Nighthawks’ drummer. The difference is that Mr. Giordano conducts purely with the sound and force of his instruments rather than the customary baton; more on that shortly.

This points to a fascinating paradox. Mr. Giordano plays many instruments but essentially all of them are to serve one single, vital function. Conversely, most of his longtime fans and listeners think of what the Nighthawks play as one single body of music: the jazz and occasionally pop sounds of the 1920s and ’30s. In actuality, though, this is many different kinds of music. In the Jazz Age itself, you would never hear the music of Duke Ellington and Paul Whiteman in the same venue; they were considered very different from each other — segregated by race and geography — even if approximately part of the same generation and the same general spectrum.  

Mr. Giordano has forged an orchestra that can transition effortlessly from the majestic elegance of Ellington (“Ring Dem Bells,” “Old Man Blues”); to the whimsical creations that Mr. Giordano’s mentor, Bill Challis, wrote for Whiteman (“Dardanella”); to the hard driving proto-swing of the territory bands like Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra (no Mr. Moten last night, but he often plays “Oh Eddie”); to snappy-peppy show and movie tunes like Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and Walter Donaldson’s “My Baby Just Cares For Me” — usually the province of “hot” white bands; to smaller groups playing wildly heterophonic treatments of warhorses (“Sunday”) in a style that would later be christened as “Dixieland”; to the creamy sounding dance music of the late 1930s (“East of the Sun”).

It’s not just that the Nighthawks can play it all perfectly, but that they play it in a way that makes all the different strains of the era sound like they belong together, like diverse dishes in an ambitious musical buffet. 

Near the end of the Tuesday night set, Mr. Giordano called “Everybody Shuffle,” a 1933 composition by Benny Carter, another giant of a multi-instrumentalist and bandleader. The tune, which was first recorded by violinist Joe Venuti (another Giordano mentor), is pure sophistication: The horns play a catchy riff in a clipped staccato rhythm designed to keep dancers on the tips of their toes. (The only drawback of the Birdland engagement is, in fact, the lack of space for dancing.)

Mr. Giordano then did a complete about-face and called what must be the funkiest tune in the book, Luis Russell’s “The Call of the Freaks.” (The title could be a dedication to the characters who populate 44th Street right outside Birdland.) This is the polar opposite of sophistication, an exaggeratedly funky and highly dissonant blues. The band — especially trombonist Jim Fryer — growls and moans provocatively, in order to encourage dancers to grind their anatomies together in a highly suggestive manner. 

It’s full of surprises, including a xylophone solo by Doug Marriner, before the band chants, “Stick out your can, here comes the garbage man”; in fact the piece was later recorded by both the Harlem Hamfats and Milton Brown (progenitors of R&B and western swing, respectively), as “Garbage Man Blues.”  

Could any other ensemble transition so effortlessly from the smooth to the savage? The segue from “Everybody Shuffle” to “Call of the Freaks” is like changing from a tuxedo to a sanitation worker’s uniform. Mr. Giordano directs it all from the back of the stand with his arsenal of bass register instruments; it’s amazing to watch and listen as he shapes the music, the other 10 men hanging on his every beat and blast. They don’t just play the notes: The shading and the nuances, the inner dynamics of the individual sections, are like mini-miracles in themselves. 

The band contains its share of larger-than life personalities — such as trumpeters Jon-Erik Kellso and Joe Boga, Mr. Fryer on trombone, clarinetist and saxophonist Dan Levinson, and Andy Stein, a unique doubler in both violin and baritone sax — and yet it’s not merely the big moments, it’s the tiny details, that the band always gets right, even when it’s an orchestration that they are seeing and playing for the first time. (Last night, he laid an unknown and unrecorded, eccentric hot stomp titled “Smallpox” on the band and us — let’s hope that one doesn’t go viral.) To play in this band, you need cummerbunds of steel.