Dr. Andrew (Andy) Krikun is an American music educator, scholar, singer-songwriter, and performer. Andy has been making music since the late 1970s, when he founded Andy and the Rattlesnakes, dubbed “one of the great lost, eclectic underground rock n’ roll bands” by the LA Weekly. The band was a seminal force in the LA punk/new wave scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s, playing iconic venues like the Whisky a Go Go, the Troubadour, Madame Wong’s, and the Starwood. Their music lives on in the 2006 compilation Last Summer to Dance and their final eponymous album Andy and the Rattlesnakes written and recorded after the band reunited in 2012.
These days, Andy fronts the Andy Krikun Band, a group that mixes rock, R&B, soul, reggae, ska, and jazz, featuring a deep bench of NY/NJ-area musician-educators. The band has played rooms like Debonair Music Hall in Teaneck and Sullivan Hall in NYC, along with local festivals and outdoor stages. Andy Krikun’s new solo debut album, Greatest Hits, Volume 1, is now available on all major streaming platforms.
Beyond performing, Andy has written music for theatre and film, including the 1996 comedy The Shot, and holds a rare dual identity as both working musician and respected scholar — he’s a Professor of Music at Bergen Community College with a Master’s in Ethnomusicology from UCLA and a doctorate in Music Education from NYU, whose academic work on popular music education has been published internationally.