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| Seth playing the Frog, April 07' |
A Stride Pianist (a relatively obscure genre of early Jazz which bridges Ragtime and the Jazz of the Roaring 20's), Seth "Fingers" Flynn Barkan has had a colorful music career playing in popular bars and lounges of Las Vegas for the better part of 10 years. Cutting his teeth as a teenager in the mid 90's playing (the now defunct) cafe scene, he did his best to emulate the professional paths of his heroes (Earl "Fatha" Hines, Eubie Blake, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller, etc.), performing whenever and wherever there was an opportunity and an audience.
In his adult life, he has held down a five year run playing Friday nights at the (now internationally known) Freakin' Frog, one of the largest beer bars on the West Coast. It was during these Friday night gigs that Barkan shaped himself into a performer, sometimes playing for 12 hours without break in homage to the great barrelhouse blues pianists of the great Jazz Diaspora. Indeed, he credits those long nights (along with a decade and a half of composing his own music) for cultivating the (eminently useful) skill of being able to smoke a cigarette and drink a beer simultaneously without stopping the performance.
The complete creative freedom he was given during his time at the Frog also allowed him to establish his reputation for being one of the only exponents of hot Jazz in Las Vegas, playing repertoire that would have been commonly heard during Harlem rent parties from the early part of the 20th Century. Well versed in the standards of both early Jazz and the Swing era, he also enjoys performing the more obscure and lesser known works from those periods.
| Seth playing "Ain't Misbehavin'" |
He also spent two years playing cocktail piano on the Strip at the fabulous Golden Steer. A Las Vegas institution for over 50 years (making it the oldest restaurant in the city), the Steer is famous for being the favored haunt of the Rat Pack, Elvis, and other famous "old Vegas" marque acts, and the restaurant and lounge retains this classic vibe.
Barkan's boozy antics and hot-time "whorehouse-style" Stride piano have earned him hundreds of fans on YouTube, and he is currently working on recording his first album in Vegas' sister city, LA. Tentatively titled "Down And Out," it will be released in EP and on itunes, under the Working Blue Productions label and should be available during the summer of 2009.
He is available for booking; see contact page for details.