Singer and multi-instrumentalist and master of “frivolity,” Bryce Edwards knew what he he wanted from life when he was barely out of kindergarten—and that was to perform. At age six he was in a youth theater group, turning professional at age 12, and finding work in regional musicals and commercials. Music (and creativity) runs in the family. His grandmother was an opera singer and her husband sang 
with a big band, His parents inhabited the fashion industry and an aunt fronts a klezmer band jazz band. Much influenced by his singing grandfather, Edwards became attracted to the songs and singers of the bygone era. To accompany his own singing, he taught himself ukulele. Then came voice lessons and the theater department at Baldwin Wallis College and formally learning how to play more instruments, which populate the stage of his Frivolity Hour shows.
Catch the next one at Birdland on Monday, February 24 at 7 PM. Find more information and tickets here.
NiteLife Exchange (NLE) asks Bryce Edwards (BE) Six Questions:
NLE: How old were you when you first encountered the music of the 1920s, plus or minus a decade? What was the appeal?
BE: I was introduced to this music by my grandfather, who I was very close to. He loved music and introduced me at a very young age to music by George M. Cohan, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart… and, of course, tons of bizzaro novelty songs. “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night,” “The Irish Were Egyptians Long Ago,” “Princess Pupule Has Plenty Papaya (and She Loves to Give It Away)”… and he introduced me to a lot of old movies, namely The Marx Brothers movies, which always had a lot of great music in them (his favorite was A Night at The Opera, which features the gorgeous Nacio Herb Brown song “Alone,” among others). 
But mainly he exposed me to all this music just by singing it! I LOVED it, and eventually I started singing along with him. These songs were elegant, beautiful, funny, heartfelt, irreverent… I got into theater super young, and this music captured my imagination more than anything I was singing in Seussical Jr. Before I was ten I had a mini library of great American standards and bawdy vaudeville numbers irreversibly imprinted into my brain.
The main a-ha moment came probably when I was 11 or 12. I went over to my grandfather’s house and he was playing Bix Beiderbecke’s first records with the Wolverines from 1924 and 25. I heard it and my brain said “Oh, THIS is what I like!” The freewheeling horns, the feel that was somehow both laid back and full of verve, the dusty sound quality, the chunk-chunk-chunk of the banjo… I dunno, it scratched an itch in my brain that hadn’t been scratched before then. It really was kind of an instant, deep primal attraction to this music. I still feel a little bit of that initial joy and excitement when I listen to “Fidgety Feet.” The other light bulb that went off in my head is that this music exists in the world outside my grandfather’s mental library and that I had to go out and find it. When I got that initiative, one of the first artists that I listened to religiously was Eddie Cantor. When I discovered him, I thought “these 
sound like songs I’d hear from my grandfather,” and from there began my love affair with the pop, jazz, and vaudeville vocalists of the 1910s, 20s and 30s that is the main impetus behind the frivolity hour (along with the jazz-mania sparked by my introduction to Bix).
By the time I got to high school I started collecting 78 rpm records from the 20s and 30s and I would haul my record player and my 78s to my grandfather’s house and play him my new favorite Jean Goldkette or Django Reinhardt record. This inspired him to dig up his record collection, which made it even more clear that we shared some cosmic/genetic connection, because the same artists that captured his imagination in his youth were the same as the ones that had consumed mine: Ruth Etting, Scott Joplin, Joe Venuti, Fats Waller, Ted Lewis… and of course, the crooning trifecta, Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallée. According to my grandfather, he discovered his love for the early work of Bing Crosby when he was singing with the infamous Spade Cooley Orchestra and Spade himself told him to study the way Bing Crosby sang the song. (Please do keep in mind, he was a great spinner of yarns). That’s the awfully, awfully long answer to your question, but I really do feel like I owe a lot of my approach to him. His sensibility was always that of a showman, and that’s how I’ve come to approach my performances. My first objective is always to entertain the people. He had the spirit of a boater-clad vaudevillian of the previous generation somewhere inside him and that got passed down to me. He passed in late 2023, and my family gathered to sing at his bedside. I brought my ukulele and sang him the songs that he taught me. Every show I do is dedicated to his memory.
NLE: Have you considered that you might be the reincarnation 
of Ted Lewis or Rudy Vallée? Beside music, are there other aspects of the era that you’re particularly drawn to?
BE: Ha! Tiny Tim (who was a historian of early 20th century music in his own right, and, in my opinion, a far more interesting and versatile artist than many give him credit for) used to say that nothing he did was an imitation and that he was a vessel for the spirits of the phonograph era. That always appealed to me more than the idea of reincarnation because I really do feel like the spirits of this period live inside me—just in a sense that’s more poetic than literal! I myself am neither Rudy Vallée nor Ted Lewis… we’re just roommates in this corporeal form (ooOOooOh!).
The music is the love of my life, but visual art follows close behind. I’m also a fine artist, I mainly do pen and ink illustrations and the occasional oil painting (any illustration you see on my show posters is my own), and I am an art history NUT! My favorites are the German Expressionists and the new objectivity, like George Grosz, Max Beckham and Otto Dix. I love the early modernist and abstract art. My favorite of those cats is Kandinsky. I’m also inspired by a lot of illustrators and graphic artists like Aubrey Beardsley, J.C. Leyendecker, Nell Brinkley… and of course Edward Gorey, who worked in the second half of the 20th century but still lived in the same world as celery vases and Theda Bara.
Speaking of whom, I’m also kind of a movie fanatic. I actually get a lot of inspiration for my act from movies of the period! I love silent movies, I love Harold Lloyd and Charley Chase. I try to emulate a lot 
of the silent actors with my face during the show, not only because it seems the right thing to do for the period, but because I feel I have to do a little extra with my face since my arms are pretty much always tied up playing an instrument. I also get a lot of ideas for numbers from early sound musicals: for instance our arrangement of “Button Up Your Overcoat: (which I do as a duet with my wonderful girlfriend Reilly Wilmit) takes a lot of inspiration from Zelma O’Neal and Jack Haley’s (who later played the Tin Man!) performance in the 1930 film version of Follow Thru. One of these days I want to salute the precode films of Busby Berkeley. Gold Diggers of 1933 is one of my favorite movies ever (I can sing “We’re in the Money” in Pig Latin à la Ginger Rogers. (I spent more time on that than I care to admit). I also love the fashion of the era. I’m definitely something of a clothes-horse and if I could afford to I’d dress like the arrow collar man, but I like to think I’ve developed my own sort of anachronistic style.
NLE: How did you commence to develop this attraction to the period in: learning all about the music, learning the music itself and finally, performing it?
BE: I might’ve answered most of this already, but as far as learning about the music goes, I started out being infatuated with this era of recorded music and listening to everything I could find, and listening to that got me interested in the history of pop music and jazz in the first part of the 20th century and so I’d do a lot of reading and research to contextualize this music and understanding it better. Almost as long as this music has been a part of my life I’ve been 
singing it or playing it. I was singing it with my grandfather before it even fully registered to me what this repertoire was. When I found out how I could unearth this music myself, I got a ukulele specifically so I could accompany myself singing all the old music I wanted. As a musical theatre kid, my connection with it always has been tied up in singing it and performing it myself, early on mostly for my own amusement. It was when I discovered the cabaret world by way of Jim Caruso’s Cast Party and the mentorship of Miss Natalie Douglas that it hit me that there could be people out there who might actually want to hear this stuff.
NLE: You have an arsenal of vintage instruments – some very unusual and some quite esoteric. By what process did you amass this collection? Was learning to play them difficult? Which is your favorite and why?
BE: My mother and grandmother are big antique collectors, and both have an anti-minimalist quasi-Victorian sensibility when it comes to furnishings and decor. This is a trait that I also have, and I love scouring antique stores and estate sales and that sort of thing. I love objects with stories behind them and history, which is why I like to play vintage and antique instruments. It helps me feel connected to 
the tradition of the music because they were there a hundred years ago, they were the original vehicles of the songs I love. My favorite thing about playing the old instruments is that it gives me an excuse to talk about history. My rarest and most unusual instrument is a Strohviols Ukulele from around 1920, which features a horn that the sound comes out of instead of a wood body. These were built specifically for the pitfalls of early days of acoustic recording before electric microphones. This instrument was invented to work around technological limitations, which informs its odd and unique sound (this is a recurring theme in the music of this period that I am specifically interested in!).
Some instruments I found by chance, like my 1926 Banjolin (banjo/mandolin hybrid, mainly popular in pre-1920 ragtime orchestras and string bands) which I found at a flea market in PA. I brought it home, put some strings on it, and was delighted to find that despite its weathered appearance (someone named “ERNIE” carved his name into the top of the peg head) it actually sounded pretty darn good! Others I hunt down: I spent ages in search of an early Vegavox tenor banjo (designed by Eddie Peabody, these are regarded by the old-timers as the gold standard of jazz banjos) that I could semi-reasonably fit within my starving artist budget, until I eventually found a guy in Virginia who had one that had belonged to his grandfather. After decades sitting in its case, that banjo is now seeing a whole lot of action!
This may be a bit of a tangent, but another big part of my collection is sheet music. I have tons of sheet music from the early 20th century, which is a major
resource for my show. A large bulk of that collection actually came from my Alma Mater Baldwin Wallace: they had a huge large collection of sheet music from this era that they were going to throw out, and I ended up taking most of it. Whenever I make an arrangement of a song, the first place I go is the original sheet music. Many standards morph over time, so often the way most people play a song is not necessarily the way it was written, which is definitely a cool feature of the nature of jazz! However, since I take kind of a preservationist approach, when you hear a song in the show that’s generally the way it was written and originally published.
I’m sure learning any instrument is difficult! I want be sure I do the music justice, and I love to play and I love making music, so I don’t mind spending a lot of time on it. To get very good on any instrument I’m sure you’d have to love the instrument, because you’d have to be alright with spending a lot of time with it. It’s hard exactly to say which is my favorite! I taught myself the ukulele when I was about twelve, and at this point the uke feels more like an extension of my arm! In college people called me “ukulele Bryce” because I pretty much always had the darned thing on me. Accompanying myself on ukulele is so ingrained in me at this point that it happens near automatically. However, I feel like the banjo is where I really find my musical voice. I don’t often solo on the ukulele (and when I do it’s 
mainly flashy vaudevillian hokum). On the banjo I find more opportunities to sing through the instrument and (at least attempt to) honor the jazz greats I idolize (and yes, there’s plenty of those on the banjo! Ikey Robinson, Elmer Snowden, Johnny St. Cyr, to name a few). The banjo is versatile! It can be joyful or melancholy, it can swing out and it can sing the blues. And as much as I love a guitar… nothing drives a rhythm section like a banjo.
NLE: On many levels, you clearly bring joy to your audiences. Has this become a mission, especially in such troubled times—to be a port in a storm, even if for an hour of frivolity?
BE: Honestly, yes. With AI being totally inescapable, and the infinite content factory of the internet, people are increasingly treated like consumers first, humans second, because our attention has been totally commodified. You open social media and you’re bombarded with slop that’s engineered to trigger whatever brain chemical will keep you there the longest and all it does is make you feel terrible. Frankly, I think that people need more out-and-out entertainment that doesn’t make you feel terrible! I think that at its very core the music of the 20s and 30s is humanistic music. The great songwriters of this era wrote music that anyone can relate to and they did it in a way that’s gorgeous and earnest and artful. Jazz is a celebration of humanity’s singular ability to be expressive! I fill my shows with music that makes me happy and I hope people feel that. People need wonderful nonsense.
I like the phrase “everything old is new again.” I don’t know of anyone else who has really made their stock and trade faithfully emulating the singers 
of the 20s, and we’re just far removed enough from that era at this point that when people hear me they know what I’m doing but they find something surprising in it. I think it’s important to remember that this was music made by young people for young people, and that, in a way, it was the Wild West era of jazz and pop music. Nothing was really standardized yet, so people were trying all kinds of things that, nowadays, are surprising all over again.
I also would love to foster interest in this era of music. I hope to give people more context for this music to help bring it to life for them. If one person goes home and seeks out the music of Cliff Edwards, I might actually cry tears of joy.
NLE: How much frivolity can a young man partake of? In other words, being still a young man, how do you see your career trajectory playing out?
BE: The wonderful thing is that I’m constantly finding new repertoire, so I definitely intend to keep exposing people to this era of music, be it with the Frivolity Hour or other endeavors. I have a show down the road with the great Mike Davis, where we’ll be performing arrangements that Cliff Edwards recorded with Red Nichols in 1925–some of my favorite music ever–so I’m excited beyond belief for that.
However, I also write original music that I’ve featured with Necromancers of the Public Domain and now most recently with the Western podcast serial “The Town with No Name.” I’m a visual artist like I said earlier, and I’ve also written plays. My girlfriend wants me to write a musical of The Wrong Box, and frankly I don’t think it’s a half bad idea… I want to figure out how to tie in my visual art into my performances, though, and do something that is as much a visual statement as it is a musical one.
Otherwise… I dunno! I’ve always wanted to play the Bijou or the Roxy. Whaddaya think? Is it doable?
Photo Credits Top to Bottom:
Neal Siegal
Matt Baker
The Necromancers of the Public Domain
Matt Baker
With Grandfather Bob Fogarty
Matt Baker
Matt Baker
Stephen Mosher
With Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks
Kevin Alvey
