Musical Lineage & Collaborators

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Jack came up in the early rock scene of Santa Cruz — a pianist and keyboardist who played with Asleep at the Wheel and Commander Cody, toured with country singer Lacy J. Dalton, and spent 25 years teaching songwriting in California prisons through the Arts in Corrections program. He found his way into Vintage Noise through Steve Larkin, and brought with him a lifetime of musical experience that had crossed every genre imaginable before landing, naturally, in a jazz and bossa nova ensemble.

Jack was the band’s first steady pianist — the one who helped shape the warm, swinging elegance that still defines the Vintage Noise sound today. He and Steve have a pocket together that takes most musicians years to find. Though he has stepped back from regular appearances, when Jack returns the band settles into something immediately familiar — like a conversation that picks up exactly where it left off.

David is a violinist and fiddler born and bred in the San Francisco Bay Area who has never been content with just one musical world. Trained at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and San Francisco State University, he plays gypsy jazz with the 29th Street Swingtet, Scandinavian folk with Kaptain Bottletop, and carries instruments most people have never heard of — including a hardanger d’amore, a ten-stringed Norwegian fiddle, and a seven-string electric violin. He came into the Vintage Noise orbit through the famed gypsy jazz guitarist Jimmy Grant, and has been part of the family since 2014.

It turns out a violin belongs in this music. David proved it. Whether trading phrases with Michael on a swing tune or weaving gypsy lines through a bossa nova, something shifts in the room when he plays — and Ed, who notices everything, notices this most of all. He is now based in Germany but returns whenever life allows. The band is never quite the same without him, and everyone will tell you so.

Caroline is an Oakland-based bassist, composer, and bandleader who has spent two decades doing things her own way. The leader of Citizens Jazz, she made her SFJAZZ debut exploring Nina Simone’s Silk & Soul, and released her debut album Sounds of Haejin — a genre-defying collection drawing on jazz, funk, spoken word and Afrocentric rhythms featuring the San Francisco Poet Laureate. On any given week, she might be organizing a Women in Jazz showcase, recording with a poet, or pushing the boundaries of what a bass can do in a live setting.

On other weeks, she’s with the boys of Vintage Noise, laying down bass lines that make the whole room swing harder. Caroline brings a physicality and fearlessness to the bandstand that the band didn’t know it needed until she showed up. Michael and Franz both play differently when she’s there — a little looser, a little more alive. She doesn’t belong here in any conventional sense. That’s exactly why she fits.

Marty co-leads TC Jazz — an ensemble whose repertoire moves comfortably from Cole Porter and Harold Arlen to Miles Davis and Bill Evans — and has been a working bassist across the Bay Area for decades, equally at home in jazz combos and full big bands. He also plays violin, which he mentions only when the moment calls for it. The moment always calls for it.

Within Vintage Noise, Marty has become a monthly fixture at the GrandView — reliable, warm, and deeply musical in the way only a lifetime of listening produces. He and Michael have an easy rapport on the bandstand that spills naturally into the music, the kind where you’re never quite sure where the jokes end and the swing begins. When the violin comes out, Franz is the first to smile.

Jason is the uncrowned prince of bluegrass — a guitarist, composer, and bandleader whose playing moves between jazz and bluegrass with the ease of someone who belongs in both. A graduate of East Tennessee State University’s Bluegrass Studies program and San Jose State’s Jazz Studies program, Jason didn’t choose between two worlds. He fused them. His recordings on OA2 and Adhyâropa Records have earned him collaborations with some of the most respected names in acoustic and jazz guitar, and his live performances — from Bay Area wine bars to IBMA’s World of Bluegrass — reflect an artist still very much in the middle of becoming something remarkable.

He came into Vintage Noise as a student and has never really left. When Jason is on the bandstand the music can go anywhere — a mellow tune suddenly finds another gear, a standard opens up in a direction nobody expected. He and Franz are the only ones who can keep up with each other when things start moving, and things always start moving when Jason is in the room. He has gone on to record and lead his own projects, and still comes back. That says everything.

Steve is a Santa Cruz bassist who has spent decades doing what great bassists do — showing up, holding the groove, and making everyone around him sound better. Michael and Steve first met as guests of the South Bay Swing Band, and the connection was immediate. Steve came into Vintage Noise in 2014 and proceeded to appear at nearly every significant gig the band has played —  Rosewood Sand Hill, the Gilroy Garlic Festival, Cinnabar Winery, Cafe Pink House, Cafe Claude, Wente Vineyards, Le Plonc, Flight Wine Bar, House Family Vineyards, Byington Vineyards, the DoubleTree Hilton, and Levi’s Stadium among them.

He and Jack Bowers have a pocket together that feels lived in and easy — two musicians who know the music so well they can put songs within songs, trading ideas without ever losing the thread. Steve has since stepped back from late night travel, but still returns for daytime gigs close to home. When he does, everything settles. He is as close to family as this band has — and has been since nearly the beginning.

Christopher studied jazz guitar under Rick Vandivier at San Jose State University — the same Rick Vandivier who co-led Primary Colors alongside Nate Pruitt, Michael’s mentor. Neither Christopher nor Michael knew that when they found each other in their early twenties. What they built together in those early years — a young crooner and a jazz guitarist shaped by one of the Bay Area’s finest — had the bones of something real. The early Vintage Noise stages, from Castlewood Country Club to Yoshi’s San Francisco, were theirs.

Christopher eventually moved on to pursue his own projects — composing, teaching, leading his own ensembles. The band evolved, the sound deepened, and life took them both in different directions. When Christopher returns, it feels less like a guest appearance and more like a reminder of where it all began. Some foundations don’t need to be seen to hold everything up.

Ricardo Silvestri is a Bay Area guitarist with over two decades of experience playing just about anything in just about any room — jazz, blues, classical, rock, swing. He teaches at Showcase Music Institute in San Jose, performs regularly across Northern California, and has shared stages from Cafe Claude in San Francisco to Le Plonc Wine Bar in Sunnyvale to Levi’s Stadium. He is the definition of a working musician — versatile, professional, and always prepared.

Within Vintage Noise, Ricardo has been a steady presence for nearly a decade, showing up wherever the music needs a guitarist and delivering every time. He doesn’t impose a style so much as serve the song — present, responsive, and completely reliable. Michael knows that when Ricardo is on the bandstand, that part of the evening is handled. In a band built on trust, that is no small thing.