Born: June 1, 1958 Primary Instrument: Guitar
Last Updated: March 23, 2013The Swing Now Trio, three versatile musicians who have been kindling memories of the Swing Era, including the big bands and the jitterbugs, every Wednesday night for more than a year at the North River Bar in Tribeca (145 Hudson Street), brought their music but not their dancers uptown to the garment district Thursday evening to play at Terranova, a restaurant at 18 West 38th Street.
Despite the limitations of its size, the trio occasionally manages to project the spirit of the Swing Era big bands by using various combinations of the seven instruments they play -piano and string bass (John DeCesare), guitar (Tony DiGregorio) and tenor and bass saxophone, flute and rums (Bryant DuPre). But inevitably it is more representative of the small groups that once swung on 52d Street.
Mr. DuPre has a swaggering tone on tenor saxophone that enables him to live up to one's expectations of Coleman Hawkins's tune ''Stuffy'' or Ike Quebec's ''Scufflin' ''. Mr. DiGregorio's guitar is the vitalizing core of the group, holding it together while the two others shift from one instrument to another. His guitar is the basic swinging stimulus of the trio and its prime solo voice, at one moment racing headlong through several choruses of ''Sweet Sue'' and then transposing the Casa Loma Orchestra's big-band arrangement of its theme, ''Smoke Rings,'' into an effectively dreamy guitar solo.
