Hot Combination at Birdland: Bryce Edwards and Mike Davis Resurrect the Jazz Age
This week at Birdland Jazz Club, a lull gave way to joy. Eight young men, each in bespoke tailoring, strode onto the bandstand. The century seemed to fold in half. Mike Davis stood between the trombone and the alto saxophone, his pencil mustache neat as a record groove, his golden cornet gleaming. A few feet away, Bryce Edwards bounded, all gusto and grin, ukulele cradled like a confidant. The band kicked off with After You’ve Gone, and the air seemed to lift.
Eyes smiled and feet tapped! One almost expected the audience to leap from their chairs and Charleston down the aisles. This began a night of glorious musical time travel—wistful yet alive, sentimental yet sharp, historic yet present. This was Hot Combination: The Cliff Edwards/Red Nichols Project, a genuine celebration of good times not entirely past.
Why Two Forgotten Geniuses Still Matter
Davis and Edwards have built their evening around a musical friendship that flourished a century ago. At the time, Cliff Edwards — a ukulele player and vocalist later known as Jiminy Cricket — joined Red Nichols, a cornetist whose fresh style hinted at a new kind of jazz that history did not fully embrace. In 1925, they recorded some of the era’s liveliest songs. Reviving them now is not just nostalgia; it is a statement — using banjo and brass — that popular songs deserve the same respect as works performed in concert halls.
Bryce Edwards at Birdland Jazz Club, in Hot Combination: The Cliff Edwards/Red Nichols Project NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus
Consider the world that produced this music. After the trauma of the First World War, dance bands surged to the fore. Jazz and blues, almost overnight, moved from the margins to the marquee. Despite Prohibition's long, dry absurdity, the era’s sound remained buoyant, danceable, and teeming with hope. People dressed sharply. Flappers bobbed their hair and their consciences. Dada provoked. Art Deco dazzled. The new talkies began to marry music to moving light. It was, in short, a civilization learning to be young again. This band knows it in its bones.
Bryce Edwards: A Crooner Channeling Ghosts
Watching Edwards, one cannot help but recall Al Jolson. Jolson, self-styled 'World’s Greatest Entertainer,' ruled Broadway, radio, and early recordings. He sang in The Jazz Singer (1927), the first hit talking picture. Yet Edwards is no impersonator. He sings with his own unmistakable voice. His expressive eyes and upward glance catch the light, revealing two striking blue irises. His flexible, confiding phrasing recalls Jolson’s drama and Cliff Edwards’ subtle intimacy. His ukulele—skilled, clever, light—brings vaudeville’s charm into the present. In the spirit of the era, he is a 'nouveau vaudevillian.' At twenty-four, he is already an expert in hot traditional jazz, at ease on banjo, tenor guitar, and mandolin, and influenced by Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallée, and Ted Lewis.
Mike Davis and a Bandstand of Bespoke Talent
If Edwards supplies the heart, Mike Davis supplies the architecture. His cornet — praised elsewhere as the work of an “eloquent trumpet prodigy” — revives the charisma of Red Nichols. That cool tone and avant-garde poise shine through. As leader of The New Wonders, named for the Conn cornet model beloved by Bix Beiderbecke, Davis transcribed these hot sessions with a scholar’s devotion and a showman’s flair. In Davis’s able hands, the uniquely rich, mellower tone of the cornet added character and style.
Mike Davis, Cornet. Courtesy @mikedavisjazz on Instagram
The supporting cast were soloists in their own right. Ricky Alexander made the alto saxophone and clarinet sing and snarl by turns. Josh Holcomb gave the trombone its sass. Bryan Reeder tumbled and strode at the piano, his left hand seemingly walking on its own. Jay Rattman anchored everything on the gloriously cavernous bass saxophone. This is a beast you simply do not hear anymore, and a wonder when you do. Félix Lemerle drove the rhythm on banjo and guitar. His propulsive snap is that of a great chordal player. Colin Hancock kept the locomotive humming from the drums. Between numbers, the repartée — the clever, affectionate storytelling of Edwards and Davis as raconteurs — saluted both the period and its songs with gusto and aplomb.
A Few Songs That Built a Genre
Several selections deserved their own time in the spotlight. After You’ve Gone, written by Turner Layton and Henry Creamer and first recorded a century ago, opened the night with an authentic period sound. This jazz standard has served as a stage for improvisers from Bessie Smith to Benny Goodman. In this performance, the band established its sound in just one chorus. Dinah, a 1925 song by Akst, Lewis, and Young that Cliff Edwards made famous, appeared as a transcription by Bryce. It brought the evening’s gentlest swing. I Know That You Know, a lively showpiece by Vincent Youmans, challenged the soloists with its pace, and they met it. Between vocal numbers, two instrumental pieces from the Nichols songbook, Plenty Off Center and Trumpet Sobs, both recorded by the trio We Three in 1926, captured the chamber-jazz style of the founding cool school: three instruments in relaxed conversation, each phrase considered and answered. Someone’s Stolen My Sweet, Sweet Baby showed that the era’s so-called “novelty” tunes held true emotion beneath their cheerful surfaces. The encore — Singin’ in the Rain, a classic by Brown and Freed, introduced by Cliff Edwards in the 1929 Hollywood Revue — ended the event joyfully. This arrangement was crafted by Edwards “in the Nichols vein.” Stride piano, bass saxophone, banjo: the writing matched the music’s distinctiveness without freezing it in place.
Front and Center: Mike Davis, at Birdland Jazz Club, in Hot Combination: The Cliff Edwards/Red Nichols Project NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus
Part Concert, Part Séance, Part History
What Edwards and Davis have carved out, moreover, is a niche all their own in the contemporary entertainment landscape—a genuinely audacious one. In an age of algorithmic playlists and frictionless streaming, they have staked their claim on the opposite shore: living, analog, room-shaking performances of music nearly a century old, rendered not as costume-party kitsch but as serious, swinging, scrupulously researched art. Theirs is part concert, part séance, part history seminar conducted at full gallop, and it answers a hunger few of us knew we carried. Indeed, by treating the "overlooked" hot jazz of the 1920s with the same devotion we grant the symphony, this troupe quietly advances an argument that the great champions of popular art would have cheered: that joy, craft, and cultural memory are not opposing values but one and the same. In bringing Cliff Edwards and Red Nichols roaring back to a packed New York bandstand, they have made the past feel less like an artifact than a rediscovered country—and invited a new generation to emigrate there for an evening.
Bryce Edwards. Courtesy @gobbydafoo on Instagram
An Antique Musical Time Machine, Still Running
There is something remarkably heartening about a roomful of strangers—young, old, and older still—moving together to songs none of them were alive to hear when those songs were first released. As a boy, I recall my father’s dusty collection of 78-rpm records and the first time I heard songs like “Yes!” We Have Not Bananas sung by Eddie Cantor. The antique music was its own time machine. That, finally, is what Davis and Edwards have built: not a museum but a living machine powered by joy, scholarship, and deep, open love. Go, and let it take you somewhere wonderful.
L-R: Bryce Edwards, Vocals and Ukulele, Ricky Alexander, Alto Saxophone and Clarinet, Mike Davis, Cornet, Jay Rattman, Bass Saxophone, and Josh Holcomb, Trombone, at Birdland Jazz Club, in Hot Combination: The Cliff Edwards/Red Nichols Project NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus
Hot Combination at Birdland: Bryce Edwards and Mike Davis Resurrect the Jazz Age
Show: Bryce Edwards & Mike Davis’ HOT COMBINATION — The Cliff Edwards/Red Nichols Project
Venue: Birdland Jazz Club, 315 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036
Box Office: (212) 581-3080 — open 2:00 PM to 11:00 PM daily
Tickets & Upcoming Seasons: birdlandjazz.com/calendar | Hot Combination event page
The Artists and Their Roles
Bryce Edwards — vocals & ukulele Mike Davis — cornet Ricky Alexander — alto saxophone & clarinet Josh Holcomb — trombone Bryan Reeder — piano Jay Rattman — bass saxophone Félix Lemerle — banjo & guitar Colin Hancock — drums
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