[Dixielandjazz] Hot Club of Cowtown

[Don Robertson]

Maybe not OKOM, but MKOM.  Not sure how I discovered them, but they did 
appear here in the S F Bay Area a year or so ago.  I have about 3 of 
their CD's.  They play "Cherokee Shuffle" a tune i used to play on my 
fiddle.

They have a website:

http://hotclubofcowtown.com/index.htm

Napa Don Robertson



On 1/8/2011 7:27 AM, Stephen G Barbone wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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