Vincent James Giordano was born on March 11, 1952, in Brooklyn, New York. His introduction to jazz came at about the age of five, when he played his grandmother's 1920s records on her Victrola, among them a Louis Armstrong disc on Okeh, King Oliver's "Every Tub" on Brunswick, and an Ethel Waters side on Columbia. By his own account the energy and syncopation of those records beat anything on the pop radio his parents played, and at 14 he decided he wanted to play that music in his own lifetime and in high fidelity. By 15 he was working professionally on string bass and bass saxophone, and he took lessons from the arranger Bill Challis, who had written for Jean Goldkette's orchestra from 1926 and then for Paul Whiteman, to learn how to score for a 1920s dance band. Before and alongside leading his own group he played with the New Paul Whiteman Orchestra, Bob Greene's band, the New York Jazz Repertory Company, the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Band, and Leon Redbone.

After a stint in the Navy Show Band he formed the Nighthawks, an orchestra devoted to the hot jazz and dance music of roughly 1919 to the mid-1930s (Wikipedia dates its founding to 1976). In 1977 the band began a three-year residency at the Red Blazer Too in New York, with trumpeter Warren Vaché and a group of older big-band veterans, some of them from the Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Casa Loma orchestras. A recommendation from Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun led to a year-long booking at the Carlyle Hotel. Giordano leads from the bass chair, playing tuba, bass saxophone and string bass and singing. He is also a collector and music historian; Wikipedia puts his library at more than 60,000 scores, alongside 78 rpm discs, piano rolls and silent-film cues.

Film work began when he met the pianist Dick Hyman in a record store and offered to audition on tuba, bass or bass saxophone. Hyman, about to score Woody Allen's 1920s-set Zelig (1983), had him bring all three instruments to the studio, and Giordano went on to play on Hyman's scores for Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Everyone Says I Love You (1996). Reed player Bob Wilber, scoring Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984), needed a small band for a scene with Richard Gere and Diane Lane and hired the Nighthawks. Credits that followed include Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989), Bix (1991), and Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999), in which Giordano appears on screen as the bassist in the band of Sean Penn's fictional guitarist Emmet Ray. Later film credits include Finding Forrester (2000), Ghost World (2001), Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), whose soundtrack album includes three Nighthawks tracks, The Good Shepherd (2006), and Revolutionary Road. Music supervisor Randall Poster hired the band for HBO's Boardwalk Empire (2010 to 2014), on which Giordano also appeared, and the first soundtrack album from the series won the 2012 Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media. The band also worked on HBO's Mildred Pierce (2011) and Bessie (2015), Allen's Café Society (2016), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Succession, and in 2023 Giordano appeared in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon as a radio bandleader.

Outside the screen, the Nighthawks have been guests on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, played the 2012 Newport Jazz Festival, and accompanied Buster Keaton's silent film The Cameraman at the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival. Giordano has also scored and performed with silent films at the Museum of Modern Art, including a program of Hal Roach shorts in 2017. In May 2011 he doubled on tuba and string bass with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at Rose Theater, in a concert promoting Ken Burns's documentary Prohibition. The 2016 documentary There's a Future in the Past is about him and the band. His recent recordings include I'd Rather Lead a Band (2020), a set of vintage songs with Loudon Wainwright III backed by the Nighthawks, and a 78 rpm record on Rivermont Records issued in 2024 and recorded in 2022 by the engineer Stewart Lerman. As of November 2026 the band's calendar lists Monday and Tuesday evening shows at Birdland in Manhattan, with dates running into the new year.

Giordano is a repertory specialist in the most literal sense. The Nighthawks play the music of the 1920s and early 1930s, drawn from the books of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, Jean Goldkette, Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet and James Reese Europe, and his stated aim in the studio is to get as close to the original record as the arrangement allows. He has said he tells his players to study the old discs for their on-the-beat phrasing, vibrato and growl, which he calls a language no longer much spoken. The band keeps to the instrumentation of the period, which Giordano described to NPR as roughly three brass, three reeds that double on clarinet, soprano and baritone, and a rhythm section of piano, banjo, drums and one bass instrument; he covers that last chair on tuba, bass saxophone or string bass depending on the tune, and he also sings and conducts. His teacher Bill Challis supplied the link to the Goldkette and Whiteman arrangements that remain central to the book. NPR has called him the go-to guy for music of that period, and Giordano told JazzTimes in 2011 that the attention from film and television had brought a renaissance in which it was acceptable again to like and play this music.