Hot Club of Cowtown puts its own spin on Western swing and jazz
The Hot Club of Cowtown is back, after a 4-year break, and the sabbatical clearly did not diminish their passion for their unique mix of Western swing and vintage hot jazz — or dim their talents when it comes to finding new ways of synergizing those styles.
Hot Club of Cowtown play day 2 of the Ann Arbor Folk Festival, Saturday at Hill Auditorium.
Indeed, their time off only seems to have burnished their skills and range. In the case of singer/fiddler Elana James, recording a solo album didn’t hurt, either, in terms of fully realizing her own musical vision. Nor did touring as a member of Bob Dylan’s band for a few months in 2005.
“I gained a lot of confidence and a lot of positive reinforcement from Bob,” says James, who joins her Hot Club bandmates on Saturday at Hill Auditorium for a set at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival.
The classically trained James is better known to long-time Hot Club fans by her given name, Elana Fremerman — she changed her last name to James when she released her ’06 solo disc.
At any rate, she got a call from Dylan, inviting her to join his touring band, in ’05 — a year after Hot Club had impressed Dylan when they opened for him during his tour with Willie Nelson. “Playing in his band was a real challenge and a great learning experience,” says James from her home in Austin, Texas. “I only had about 10 days to learn his songs, because I really didn’t know his music that well — I had grown up playing classical music and then got right into Western swing and jazz.
“But he put me right up front onstage with him, and we played off of each other a lot. He said he liked my swingy style of playing. Often, what we were doing up there led to some jazz-style improvisation, and that was a lot of fun. After I left the tour, he later told me he thought I was bored playing his songs,” she adds with a laugh.
But now that Hot Club is back together, with a relatively new album — “Wishful Thinking” was released in August — James and her mates (singer/guitarist Whit Smith and upright bassist Jake Erwin) are back in their true element. “I never really wanted the group to break up,” she says. “That was just a result of the grinding reality of spending every waking moment together for several years. And Whit and I did want to do other things on our own, but we didn’t necessarily have to break up the group to do that.”
“Wishful Thinking” finds the group adding more introspective, moodier songs to their mix than in the past. James lends her breathy, almost whispery vocals to a fittingly melancholy cover of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and the girlish quality of her voice brings a poignancy to their interpretation of Tom Waits’ moody “The Long Way Home.”
And Smith’s somewhat nasal vocal practically channels Willie Nelson’s on the wistful cover of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia” (a standard that Nelson had a big hit with many years ago). On that tune, James’s haunting fiddle lines provide counterpoint to Smith’s supple jazz guitar chording.
And on “Wishful Thinking,” the group also ups the ante when it comes to the Euro hot jazz element that has always been a key part of the Hot Club sound. Two of James’s four compositions on the disc are in that vein. “Reunion” is a darkly exotic mood piece that showcases her facility with the Gypsy jazz violin style.
“The Heart of Romain,” meanwhile, is James’s homage to French film director Tony Gatliff, whose works have offered glimpses into Romanian music and culture. On “Romain,” the group drinks deeply from the sophisticated ‘30s-era hot jazz pioneered by Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt’s Quintette du Hot Club de France ensemble.
But, in their usual fashion, the group counterbalances that moody exotica with some lively, high-stepping Western swing tunes, like “Can’t Go On This Way,” a staple from the songbook of Bob Wills, the godfather of Western-swing; and “If You Leave Me,” a Smith composition. And on James’s “Cabiria” — inspired by a character in a Federico Fellini film (namely, a ‘50s-era Roman prostitute searching for God) — James’s swing-time fiddle effortlessly interweaves with Smith’s nimble jazz-guitar progressions.
Hot Club of Cowtown performing in Nashville this fall:
Coming to town to play the Folk Fest will be satisfying to James on a personal level — she’ll be able to visit with her mom, Susan Friedman, a Royal Oak native who’s lived in Ann Arbor for many years and is a violinist who frequently performs with the Ann Arbor Symphony, as well as with symphonies in Flint and Saginaw.
Despite their successful synergy of Western swing and Euro-centric hot jazz, James irreverently laments that, too often, “here in the U.S., we’re depicted by the music press as some yee-haw, boot-scootin’ act — which of course is not what we are, and was never what the vision of the band has been.
“Unfortunately, many people have a mistaken notion of what Western swing music actually was, back in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” emphasizes James. “It was sophisticated, and classy, and cool, and it was being played on the radio in New York as well as Tulsa. And at the dances, women were dancing to this music in beautiful gowns.
“But somehow, some people have recast it as an example of kitschy Americana, which is unfortunate, because this kind of music requires a pretty high level of musicianship to be able to play it well.”
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James says she is very happy to be able to play the synergy of styles of music that she loves so much, for appreciative audiences on the folk club circuit that includes The Ark — but sometimes she feels frustrated that bands like Hot Club have not been able to appeal to a bigger audience.
“I really do feel that there is a much broader market out there for what we do,” she stresses. “I have a tenacious desire to expose this music to people outside of the folk club scene, and all of us in the group want to just keep taking this music to the people, so that someday, hopefully, that will become a reality.”
Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer and critic who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.