Baez tops the Summer Concert Bill

Folk music legend Joan Baez will headline the MU Under the Stars Summer Arts Festival at the Wachovia Amphitheater in July that will also feature Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks.

For Baez, 2008 and 2009 are landmark years. They respectively mark 50 years since she began her legendary residency at Boston’s famed Club 47 and since she made her debut at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. She remains a musical force of nature whose influence is incalculable.

Baez’s earliest recordings fed a host of traditional ballads into the rock vernacular, before she unselfconsciously introduced Bob Dylan to the world in 1963 and focused aware¬ness on songwriters ranging from Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Phil Ochs, Richard Fariña and Tim Hardin, to Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Newbury, to Dar Williams, Richard Shindell, Steve Earle and many more.

In 2007, Baez was the recipient of the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, the greatest honor that the Recording Academy can bestow and in 2008, she received the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award at the Americana Music Association's seventh annual awards show in Nashville, Tenn. The honor recognizes and celebrates artists who have ignited discussion and challenged the status quo through their music and actions. “Day After Tomorrow,’’ her first new studio album in five years, was released Sept. 9, 2008. It has been praised by critics and was nominated for a Best Contemporary Folk/American Album Grammy award, her seventh nomination.

In 30 years as a bandleader, Giordano has become the authority on recreating the sounds of 1920s and 1930s jazz and popular music. “I just love the energy of the early jazz,’’ says Giordano. “I wanted to recapture some of that.’’

Giordano and the Nighthawks are renowned on the New York scene for their commitment to preserving and authentically presenting 1920s jazz and popular music. Together, they will recreate the sounds and re-introduce a generation to the sounds of Billy Lustig and the Scranton Sirens Orchestra.

Lustig, a Scranton native, founded the Sirens in 1918. The band performed dance music in the form of jazz and played the “Tiger Rag’’ as its theme song. Jimmy Dorsey joined the orchestra in 1919 after splitting with his brother, Tommy, and dissolving the Wild Canaries band. A short time later, Tommy, auditioned for the local band by playing, “When You and I Were Young, Maggie.’’ Soon thereafter, Fred “Fuzzy’’ Farrar auditioned in Hazleton and was added to the Sirens on trumpet. Lustig, leader and violinist, now had the original nine-piece Scranton Sirens, featuring Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey playing sax and trombone, Farrar on trumpet, Irving “Izzy’’ Riskin on piano and Sid Trucker on sax.

During the Big Band era, the Scranton Sirens played at the most sought after dance locations in New York City, Philadelphia, Atlantic City and Chicago, including the Rendezvous Restaurant that was owned by Al Capone in Chicago and Club Kentucky in NYC.

As a big-band historian and collector, Giordano has more than 32,000 scores in his collection. In addition to playing the string bass, he is a multi-instrumentalist on tuba, bass saxophone, banjo, rhythm guitar, piano and drums. His early appearances with Leon Redbone and on the Prairie Home Companion and lending his talents to Francis Ford Coppola’s film, “The Cotton Club,’’ led to working with Dick Hyman’s Orchestra in half a dozen Woody Allen soundtracks then as a bass player in Sean Penn’s band in “Woody’s Sweet and Lowdown.’’

Giordano and the Nighthawks have been featured in Gus Van Sant’s film, “Finding Forrester,’’ in Martin Scorsese’s, “The Aviator,’’ Robert DeNiro’s movie, “The Good Shepherd,’’ and has recently worked with Sam Mendes on “Revolutionary Road’’ and Away We Go.’’

Under the Stars Summer Arts Festival events are held in the beautiful Wachovia Amphitheatre on MU’s 124-acre campus in Dallas, PA. The outdoor venue is the site of many campus events. Call the MU Box Office at (570) 674-6719 or reference The Arts & More section of the website at

for more information.