The Hot Club Of Cowtown is just what its name implies — a small ensemble playing a mix of hot jazz in the manner of Django Reinhardt’s and Stephane Grappelli’s Hot Club of France and Western swing in the manner of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. And in 2011 for the first time in the band’s dozen years of making records, they’ve done an album entirely of songs associated with Bob Wills.
This “hot club” is a trio comprising Elana James on fiddle, Whit Smith on guitar and Jake Erwin on doghouse bass. James and Smith share the lead vocal duties and on occasion all three join in on the choruses in killer harmony. Live, they rock and roll and sound much bigger than a trio, as I can attest — and so can anybody else who was in the packed confines of the Saturday night show at Bronco Billy’s during the 2010 Sisters Folk Festival.
That kind of energy is pretty hard to capture on disc. But the Hot Club did the next best thing by laying down the tracks on this album in a whirlwind two-day recording session in a London studio while they were on tour in the U.K. The recordings captured the intimacy, urgency and improvisational nature of the sessions, as comes especially clear on the four instrumental numbers here. What also becomes clear via James’s fiddling, especially on “A Maiden’s Prayer” and “Smith’s Reel” is the Celtic roots of much of this music.
But the influences behind Will’s swing music came from far and wide, which was one of the keys to its popularity in the post-WWII Southwest. So in addition to those hot instrumentals, there’s the western takes on ballads like “Time Changes Everything” (a sweet duet by James and Smith) and “Keeper of My Heart,” country standards like “Faded Love,” bluesy fare like “Along The Navajo Trail,” novelties like “The Devil Ain’t Lazy,” double-entendre ditties like “What’s The Matter With The Mill” and the various shuffles and swings and two-steps like “She’s Killing Me,” “It’s All Your Fault,” “Oklahoma Hills,” “Big Balls In Cowtown,” “Osage Stomp” and the closer “Stay All Night.”
The Hot Club Of Cowtown has a full slate of appearances all across the U.S. and back again in the summer of 2011, ending with a fall swing through the U.K., so check out the tour schedule on their website and go to a show if you can. In the meantime, you can sample and then buy What Makes Bob Holler on the same Web site.
(Proper, 2010)
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