on violin, Peter Ecklund on cornet, and Jason Sypher on bass. Fishman led the band on guitar, vocals, and (occasionally) banjo, playing genres that ranged from early jazz to pop, blues, parlor songs, and rural numbers. After the release of their first CD, The Howard Fishman Quartet, Jason Sypher was replaced by Jon Flaugher on bass. A second CD, The Howard Fishman Quartet, Vol. 2, featuring additional material from the sessions that produced the first CD, was released in 2005. The quartet toured Paris in May 2000, and returned to become a fixture on the New York music scene, garnering favorable reviews from The New York Times, The New Yorker, Le Monde, The International Herald Tribune, and The Village Voice. The band was awarded the BackStage Award for "Outstanding Musical Group". Trumpeter Erik Jekabson joined the Howard Fishman Quartet in the summer of 2000 (replacing cornetist Peter Ecklund). After two of the four original members left and Fishman began writing more original material, the group began to pursue a different musical path. The band had regular residencies at downtown hotspots like Joe's Pub at The Public Theater and hipster venues in Brooklyn like Pete's Candy Store and Galapagos, where they joined the burgeoning Williamsburg music scene. The shows became more experimental, and Fishman's original material took center stage. The quartet's second album, I Like You A Lot, was included on Andrew Dansby's list of top albums of 2001 in Rolling Stone and landed Fishman national exposure as a featured guest on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. The Basement Tapes Project Fishman's Basement Tapes Project had its debut at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater in New York City in 2006. Over the course of three evenings, Fishman and members of his band (including Mazz Swift, Mark McClean, Michael Daves, and Ian Riggs) presented most of the over 80 bootlegged songs (all of them since then officially released), known as Bob Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes. The project included readings from Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic (book). A CD/DVD featuring highlights from these shows, Howard Fishman Performs Bob Dylan & The Band's 'Basement Tapes' Live at Joe's Pub, was released in 2007, and included a cover of I'm Not There (1956), which was praised by Marcus. The project has subsequently been programmed at performing arts centers across America, including Lincoln Center (where it was featured as part of the "American