[Dixielandjazz] Hot Club of Cowtown

[Stephen G Barbone]

Is Western Swing OKOM? Before reading the below, check out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YUI15MuoRY&feature=related

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


Swing That’s Smoked and Saucy and Will Stick

NY TIMES - By JON CARAMANICA - January 7, 2011


Thursday night, in the basement of Hill Country Barbecue Market, where  
pork ribs and slices of brisket are eaten off slick butcher paper and  
the napkins are rolls of paper towels, the smell of Texas was almost  
as pungent as the sound.

“It certainly smelled like Austin when we walked in the door tonight,”  
said Elana James, fiddler for Hot Club of Cowtown, the revivalists of  
hot jazz, western swing and, in the case of at least one member, tight  
and slick pompadours.

But thanks to an arsenal full of technique and joy, drawing attention  
from the nose to the ear proved easy for this group, composed of Ms.  
James, Whit Smith on guitar and Jake Erwin on upright bass and,  
presumably, Brylcreem.

Individually, they’re all tremendous players, though as singers,  
they’re far less forceful. (Ms. James and Mr. Smith split lead vocal  
duties.) Nevertheless, Hot Club of Cowtown knows every workaround,  
every gambit, every way to patch its sound whole.

They play loose with tempos, speeding and slowing both the songs and  
the playing inside them. They tweak the dynamics, putting their best  
sounds forward at any given moment: on a cover of a song by Dorado  
Schmitt, the French Gypsy guitar player, Mr. Smith played snarling,  
angsty guitar filigrees until Ms. James stepped up and snatched the  
song with easy swagger.

There’s the virtuosic fiddling of Ms. James — she’s played with Bob  
Dylan’s band — and the aerobic workout that is Mr. Erwin’s bass  
playing. And there’s the band’s elemental warmth. Even a melancholy  
number described by Mr. Smith as “if Kurt Weill had been born in West  
Texas” was deeply affable.

Several songs were drawn from the band’s new album, “What Makes Bob  
Holler” (Proper American), to be released next month and consisting  
wholly of interpretations of songs by the western swing pioneers Bob  
Wills and His Texas Playboys. Recorded in single takes and modestly  
produced, it’s one of the most consistent Cowtown albums, a showcase  
for its vibrant and sometimes risky faithfulness to the genre.

A brief intermission followed the group’s first set, after which it  
returned for a second, less ambitious one, a lighthearted saunter that  
relied less on skill and more on collective, and possibly slightly  
soused, good cheer in the room. Mr. Smith expressed anxiety —  
genially, of course — on Wills’s “She’s Killing Me.” Ms. James sang a  
bittersweet song she’d written about her high school reunion. Mr.  
Smith winked his way through “Roly Poly,” which was popularized by  
Wills, and verged on lounge shtick during the standard “Cheek to Cheek.”

On a cover of Tom Waits’s “Long Way Home,” the group tried its most  
complex three-part harmony, though it was overly tentative, as if the  
band members weren’t sure where to place all the voices at once.

But just before the end of the night, during a cover of the Light  
Crust Doughboys’ western swing chestnut “Pussy Pussy Pussy,” Cowtown  
roared back. Mr. Smith and Mr. Erwin kept prodding Ms. James: “Ma’am,  
is this your cat?” It wasn’t, she proclaimed, as she teasingly coaxed  
naughty meows from her fiddle.