Review: Hot Club of Saratoga in Jazz on Jay Finale; Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026

Hot Club of Saratoga bassist/leader Dylan Perillo introduced a song Thursday in a multi-lingual pun-fest: “The Bear Missed His Train,” he deadpanned. Unfazed, singer Julia Posin jumped into the uptempo “Bei Mir Bistu Schein.” (That’s the original Yiddish spelling; Schoen or Schon in German: “To Me, You’re Beautiful”) 

Dylan Perillo, above; Below: The Hot Club of Saratoga, from left: Johnathan Greene, Julia Posin, Chuck Kish, Bobby Davis and Perillo

Posin sang mostly in English, though “La Vie En Rose” of course was in French, and she returned to her first language at the end. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; and some of the Hot Club’s most engaging songs needed no words in any language.

Built more or less on the revered blueprint of the Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli (1930s and 40s Parisian) Hot Club of France, they were well-armed with two guitars (Chuck Kish, tireless rhythm zip; and Bobby Davis, blazing hot leads or subdued bluesy runs) and Perillo’s upright bass pushing the beat. Up front, they added Jonathan Greene’s clarinet and Posin singing and playing washboard.

Above: Julia Posin; below; Chuck Kish

They seemed well warmed up right out of the box with “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” then swung even faster in “Sheikh of Araby” – Davis’s first seriously fast flame-strummed guitar lead before Posin and Perillo ping-ponged riffs back and forth until Posin sang it home.

They slowed for the sentimental “Do You Know That It Means to Miss New Orleans,” in the slow-swing grace that inspired Reinhart and Grappeli’s ballad style and found Posin persuasively languid. Then they revved up, though not too much, for the fatalistic “Comes Love.” 

In Billie Holiday’s slow, torchy “Fine and Mellow,” its lyrics pained with contradictions, Greene’s clarinet cast a melancholy spell. 

They played the feelings, not just the sounds. And they hit everything straight on, without ironic (or temporal) distance, even in Gene Autry’s (if I can’t have you!) “I Want to Be Lonesome”or Hoagy Carmichael’s “Coney Island Washboard.” Both could have felt cornball, antique/comic. Nothing felt museum-y, either. When the vocal harmonies came unglued in “Lonesome,” they course-corrected and only laughed afterward. And Posin all but lit her washboard on fire in “Coney.”

Their arrangements mixed respect with personality, especially well in the (over-) familiar “Caravan” and the playful bounce and counter-melodies they added to “Exactly Like You.” Everybody got solos, except the ever-stalwart Kish, the revered elder they consulted for what to swing next after “Bei Mir Bistu Schein” – “Tiger Rag,” as it turned out.

Above: Jonathan Greene; below: Bobby Davis

Always fluid, Greene was at his most poignant in “Fine and Mellow” and “Break of Day” back to back; then upbeat in “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” later. Davis detonated lightning strums in double-time breaks, distortion adding a somewhat modern edge, while Perillo revved into percussive slap-bass breaks but was even more impressive in call-and-response riff conversations.

At the end, Posin sang “Ochi Chorny” – “Dark Eyes.” That’s “Очи Черные” in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian – “my first language,” as Posin told me afterward.

The Hot Club of Saratoga swung that one, too.

While Thursday’s show marked the end of free jazz in downtown Schenectady for the summer, there’s more coming around, not far way. Albany’s Riverfront Jazz Festival hits on Sept. 5 in the Corning Preserve and Jazz at the Lake fills the Sept. 18–20 weekend. 

Thursday also marked the last Jazz on Jay concert hosted by its chair and Proctors Collaborative programming chief Lanaea Bailey, shown below. She handed out cookies and bottled water after the show.

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