[Dixielandjazz] Hot Club of Cowtown

[Marek Boym]

Now this is what I mean.  The Hot Club of Cowtown sounds, at least on
After You've Gone, very jazzy.  If this is western swing, the answer
is unequivocal yes.  But it isn't always.
Cheers

On 8 January 2011 17:27, Stephen G Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net> 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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