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Music Won’t Let Him Go
Howard Fishman Returns To Dizzy’s
Photo: Jack Vartoogian
For Howard Fishman, music was something that never let him go.
The artist whose talents include composing, singing and playing the guitar, got his start in performing music on the streets of New Orleans in the mid-1990s before he moved to New York to direct plays.
“I thought I got it out of my system,” he says, but instead, his career in music was just beginning. Fishman was playing music for guests at a play he directed when he and his fellow musicians were discovered and offered a “really big gig.” That gig at the Algonquin Oak Room in 1999 led to performances at famous locations such as the Lincoln Center and the Great American Music Hall in the U.S., and Le Petit Journal in Paris.
Fishman, who estimates that he has performed at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola about six times in the past, will return on Nov. 14, for another night of music.
Fishman and The Biting Fish Band will play original material from three records he released last year, with many of the pieces taken from “Better Get Right,” his New Orleans-themed record. The Biting Fish Band, formed in 2009, is a tribute to Fishman’s former home in the Big Easy.
Fishman wishes that his music will give his audience a sense of community, togetherness and hope.
“I hope it will make them feel good,” he says. “I hope it will make them feel connected.”
Fishman’s talents incorporate a wide range of musical styles from the jazz of New Orleans to country and blues, and to gospel and Brooklyn soul. His music involves some storytelling, and is an opportunity to be in the moment and see what happens, he says.
It’s “always very spontaneous, [with] lots of improvisation,” he says.
Fishman has recorded 10 albums; his most recent, The Howard Fishman Quartet Vol. III: Moon Country, was released in October. He also has worked on special projects including The Basement Tapes, which explores the 1967 underground recordings of Bob Dylan and The Band; and “The Romania Project,” which uses text, photographs and music performed by a chamber folk-jazz orchestra to illustrate his month-long voyage through rural Romania.
Fishman also hasn’t left behind his play writing days; he says that he has a new work in development. One of his pieces, a theatrical oratorio entitled “we are destroyed,” consists of reflections on The Donner Party Tragedy of 1846 and has been presented in workshop performances at locations including The Public Theater and The Steppenwolf Theatre.
“It all feels a little like a dream to me,” he says of his success. “I just try not to think about it too much. I’m just very lucky.”