Live On Music

Amateur Night? Not for These Bands

AMONG the familiar tenets of successful musicians — play loud, live fast, blame the bad stuff on the drummer — there’s one that is rarely heard beyond the tour bus.“It’s well known in the business that New Year’s Eve is amateur night for bands,” said Jerry Vivino, saxophonist in the Max Weinberg 7, the featured players on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.” He is a veteran of many Dec. 31 gigs with his own jazz quartet. “People are out getting drunk,” he said, “so the music doesn’t matter. Anybody can play and people will have a good time.” But Mr. Vivino — a Paterson native and brother of the rock guitarist Jimmy Vivino (who also plays in the Max Weinberg 7) and the comedian Uncle Floyd Vivino — was speaking broadly. For the third time since 2004, he and his band will play this New Year’s Eve at Shanghai Jazz in Madison, where revelers, he said, are respectful. “This is an educated crowd,” he said. “If people are looking for a certain type of party — loud, a lot of drunk people — they’re not going to find it in this setting.” Across New Jersey, more than a few well-known clubs and the home-grown artists who love them are doing their best to erase the amateur-night designation. Like Jerry Vivino, who now lives in Nanuet, N.Y., the New Brunswick-based post-punk band Thursday will play the room they consider their home venue, according to Geoff Rickly, the front man: Starland Ballroom, in Sayreville.Not that Thursday is expecting the same dressed-up, well-behaved crowd that Mr. Vivino is.“We’ve done a holiday show the last four years, but never New Year’s Eve,” said Mr. Rickly, who just completed a tour with Thursday behind this year’s “Kill the House Lights” (Victory Records), a live CD partly recorded at Starland Ballroom. “This year we’re taking the plunge.” What he expects, he said, is what he usually sees at the Sayreville haunt, only with “more of a buzz.”

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