Composer, Drummer and Producer, Patrick Soluri Leads a Hot Swing Band

Upper West Sider Patrick Soluri’s swing band the Hot Toddies started to come together just before the pandemic hit. While in quarantine, the group grew by getting creative, and released a six-song album and accompanying music videos, both remotely and then in-person as the city began opening up.

On July 28, the band will release its first full-length album, which Soluri, who grew up in the East and West Villages, produced himself. Besides his work with the band, the Manhattan School of Music alum, who has done 11 commissioned ballet scores, has an impressive resume, which includes producing live swing and jazz music events with his company Prohibition Productions. In 2017, through a jazz camp for adults that he attended, he met Grammy-nominated musician Gabe Terracciano, and they co-founded the Hot Toddies together.

In May 2022, the band, which usually performs as a sextet or septet, started a weekly gig at Somewhere Nowhere, a nightclub and lounge on the 38th floor of the Renaissance Hotel. They can be found there every Wednesday night playing for a diverse crowd of people in their 20s to 80s, and some he called “jazz curious” who have seen clips on social media which piqued their interest in the art form.

The Hot Toddies also nade their Lincoln Center debut at Summer in the City’s swing series on July 6th. “We like having fun with swing music, getting people not only dancing, but having a good time,” Soluri, 48, said. “It’s great party music.”

Explain your musical background.

I started taking percussion lessons I think when I was 4 and drums at 6 or 7. And I always kind of played throughout elementary school in a fun way and I was in the jazz band in high school, but I didn’t really like it that much. I was really into classic rock at that point. And then when I went to college, I decided to go to liberal arts schools. I went to Bennington first and had pretty amazing teachers there, but I also discovered composing and classical music and I got really interested in that. After about two years there, I decided to focus on composing and went to the Manhattan School of Music, so I stopped playing drums at that point and went full on classical music.

How did you get into producing ballets?

I was interested in ballet, the idea of telling stories in music. Both my parents are visual artists. My mom’s a painter and a conceptual artist and my dad’s a photographer, so I was always thinking about music visually in some way. That’s how I got into ballet and opera and I self-produced my first ballet when I was an undergrad. We got a New York Times review and that started my career in that direction. So I started doing a bunch of commissions for ballets.

You have an identical twin brother who is a swing dancer.

After about two years, I finally went and met him somewhere and walked into this room and it was like 100 people swing dancing to a band. And I was like, “What the hell is this?” It really opened my eyes. And my brother started producing these underground jazz parties at a true speakeasy. It was actually at the old Pianos. A friend of ours used to own the actual piano store, so for the Y2K New Year’s Eve, he actually threw this really cool swing party there and for about six months, it was this very underground swing speakeasy. That got me interested in this whole idea.

Then you got an opera fellowship and started throwing your own jazz parties.

Shortly thereafter, I went to grad school. I got an opera fellowship in Louisville of all places. It was crazy. It was a fully paid fellowship. I didn’t have to teach. They paid me to go to school. I got benefits. It was a tough choice but I went there, but then I had just been taking six months of swing lessons and I couldn’t find really any place to go, so I started a swing scene in Louisville, the Louisville Swing Dance Society. And I started throwing these parties in my apartment because I found this crazy enormous Victorian first floor of a mansion for like $500 bucks a month.

So I started throwing jazz parties there because I was friends with all the jazz musicians. They were a little bit cooler than the classical musicians. And then I would teach swing classes. And then eventually I moved back to the city and did them in my apartment here. And then it just got to a point where it got too big to keep in the apartment. One of the last big parties I threw, it was so big, people were spilling into the hallway. I had this bass player who had played with Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli. He was in his late 80s, this piano player who was playing with Les Paul. Half the core of ABT [American Ballet Theatre] was there; I was dating a ballerina at the time. We were just sitting out in the hallway and I was like, “Wow, I got to do this somewhere else.” So that’s how I started Prohibition Productions. Actually, my brother started it for the Y2K party and then I took it over.

You met your co-founder of Hot Toddies at a jazz camp for adults.

Between then and pre-pandemic, I started producing these events and it became a business. I started working with tons of musicians as a producer and promoter, and then I started realizing I was missing playing drums. So in 2017, I took this jazz camps for adults. The trumpet player Bria Skonberg, who’s a pretty well-known rising star, her and some other trad musicians started the NY Hot Jazz Camp, focused on early jazz. They asked me to promote it, but I said, “Don’t pay me. Just let me take the camp.” And then when I was there, I met Gabe Terracciano, in the spring of 2017, who I ended up founding the band with. He had just finished school; he went to NYU and was interested in trad jazz. We formulated the band around 2018. And it was in 2019 that we started working on the recording for the album that’s coming up.

This is the band’s first full-length album, right?

We started recording in 2019. We did two sessions. And then of course the pandemic hit. So what we did in between was these remote recordings... And then I put it all together and edited it, what we called the Quarantine Tracks EP, which is only six songs. And then we did some videos in the same way.

Two videos that became quite popular are “Dunkin’ Bagel” and “Five O’Clock Coffee.”

I was trying to figure out creative ways to make videos even though we were in quarantine. So for “Dunkin’ Bagel,” which was this really wacky song from the ‘40s, I had everyone film themselves while they were recording and then I put together this really wacky video. We did that video first and it got a lot of views on Facebook. And then a few months later, we did an original song that Gabe wrote, which was called “Five O’clock Coffee.” That one, we were a little more ambitious with and it was a little later in the pandemic, so we were more comfortable. Some musicians would come over one by one so I could film them. We would go out to a couple of spots that are pretty well known with swing dancers and trad musicians. We shot at Mona’s and The Back Room and did some location stuff and that was with puppets. So we found a musician that makes his own puppets, so we came up with this concept of swing dancing puppets and then they end up at a rave.

To learn more about Patrick, visit www. soluri.com

To learn more about the Hot Toddies, visit www.hottoddies.band