XL MUSIC

How Hot Club of Cowtown got back in the swing

Austin band took a break before their fans - national and international - and their own fun playing brought them back together this year

By Wes Eichenwald Photos by Tammy Perez
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Wednesday, August 06, 2008

None of them was born or raised in Austin or even in Texas. But after more than a decade, five albums, and innumerable miles on the road, the Hot Club of Cowtown have become musical ambassadors of Austin on a high level, and ranging far afield — after all, how many local bands get to play Azerbaijan?

And just when they thought they were out, they were pulled back in — or, more accurately, they pulled themselves back in.

When they went their separate ways in 2005, violinist/singer Elana James, guitarist/singer Whit Smith and bassist Jake Erwin expected that the Hot Club would only ever be heard again on their old records. (To help draw a bold dividing line between past and present, Elana even changed her last name from Fremerman to James.)

"(Whit) was just sort of tired of having to be in the band," James says, "and at the end of 2004 he said he didn't want to do it anymore. So that was it, we were fairly certain. Everyone scattered in the four directions and people had time to play out their scenarios." For James, that included playing in Bob Dylan's touring band and putting out a solo album, while Smith toured with his own combo, the Hot Jazz Caravan.

"It had a lot to do with associates we worked with," Smith says of the break. "We had a cliché bad manager that came out of a David Lynch movie. There were all the personal stresses of being together all the time. We'd done it for so long, maybe we didn't have quite the right perspective on it. Some relief time was required."

Eventually, their personal and musical chemistry exerted a gravitational pull that they couldn't ignore.

"After about a year and a half I just started playing with Elana again," Smith says. "You just get some time away from each other and you realize no one's keeping you from doing anything."

The band never officially broke up, and occasionally played together as the Hot Club during the hiatus. In late 2006 they got together for a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of the Caucasus, including Azerbaijan (the first American band to ever tour there), Armenia and Georgia. This fall, they're heading for Europe for their first concerts in Berlin and Paris, along with Norway, Sweden and maybe Prague. Devoted travelers all, James, Smith and Erwin (their fourth and longest-serving bassist is an Oklahoma native who has been with the band since 2000) agree that it's important to get out of town to have a successful career as working musicians — sometimes, way, way out of town.

"They would literally send us into these tiny villages in the far reaches of Azerbaijan," James says, "and the power generator would be turned on so we could play. At the end of a song, here come six or seven girls with bouquets of flowers for us – not just at the end of the concert, after every song!" She fondly recalls the audiences performing their own folk dances to their numbers. "To me, that was the ultimate of what music is about," she says. "It was a huge honor."

OK — they're natural ambassadors: They're polished, easygoing, hard-working, clean-cut, upbeat Western swingers all, and it doesn't hurt that Elana James is an attractive, charismatic woman. But don't let the photogenic surface deceive you: This is a wickedly oiled and driven little engine that can keep up with the best of them. Virtuosic, young (thirtysomething), and liked by audiences of all ages, the Hot Club of Cowtown is a feet-on-the-ground, professional, class act. Onstage they seem as laid-back as old Austin and make what they do seem deceptively effortless and casual, with a smooth, relaxed style (when not barnburning with showstoppers like "Orange Blossom Special").

After playing together as Elana's band last year, the trio has been back together as Hot Club of Cowtown since the start of 2008. "I just know for myself that this is a comfortable feeling for me," James says. "At this point I feel we have a lot of power as a trio; we have a kind of fifth dimension that happens when all three of us play."

These latter-day exemplars of hot jazz and Western swing have done things like open for Dylan and Willie Nelson on a tour of minor-league ballparks (in 2004). They play to huge crowds at European festivals and have done as much touring stateside as major presidential candidates. Then, when they come home to Austin, they're not too self-important to provide the soundtrack to Wednesday happy hours at the Continental Club – although, says James, the band does that for themselves because they enjoy it.

Although they're not exactly ignored on their home turf, where they have an active and vocal following, the fate of Texas bands finding greater appreciation overseas is a familiar situation that's not lost on the band.

"We definitely have had an easier time making headway abroad than we have in the United States," James says. "We've made bigger strides faster. Partly it's the corporate aspect of music-making in America, people being trained and herded in specific directions. As someone who plays a strange kind of music, not a mainstream style, why would I get mainstream success? The biggest difference is (when) you go to Australia, the U.K. or Japan, the playing field is more level there; no one has told you that it's not cool to like (something)."

A best-of CD with 20 tracks the band selected from its first five albums will be released Aug. 19 on Shout Factory, which acquired the band's catalog from longtime label HighTone earlier this year. The trio is currently busy recording what will be their first album of new material since 2002's "Ghost Train," set to come out in the first quarter of 2009. James says the new record will, like the last, contain nearly all original material; she and Smith are also collaborating on songs for the first time. If the new material follows the tone of their most recent recordings, there might be some interesting detours from the formula, like their cover of Aerosmith's "Chip Away at the Stone" from "Ghost Train."

As both players and singers, James and Smith bring a classical musician's intensity and precision to swing and pop tunes. For all her hot fiddling, James isn't a flashy vocalist; neither she nor Smith are belters who strain to impress, and they're comfortable letting the songs be the star.

"I like old singers, but I grew up listening to more modern singers," she says. "My influences are broad over time. I loved listening to Paul Simon, Blossom Dearie, Billie Holiday, Kay Starr, but also Liz Phair, the Roches. I think what most of the vocalists share is a pretty straightforward (style); it's like you get out of the way (of the melody). In my mind, it goes with emotional honesty."

Bassist Erwin, both James and Smith say, is a most valued third part of the triad. "Elana and I have kind of this propelling energy, and he plays with that," Smith says. "He plays out to the audience. Our music can be personal or cerebral or whatever, but when we play a show, it's 'out to the people,' and Jake definitely plays like that."

Why is Smith drawn to playing hot jazz and Western swing and not, like most other musicians of his generation, rock 'n' roll? When asked, he can't say – not that it's a great secret, but he just can't explain it in words.

"I think in that secret is the answer to whatever success we have," he says. "I think Elana has it, too. When I was in New York and playing rock 'n' roll – I would never have imagined playing country music (then) – people always used to tell me I sounded like a country boy. When I heard that first Bob Wills record, that was it. I had a mission at that point; I just connect with the energy and the harmony."

When they sit down to jam with veteran musicians like legendary Western swing fiddler and ex-Texas Playboy Johnny Gimble, he adds, "When they call a song, we know it, and when we call a song, they know it. You just feel like some lost ancestor or something. You've just got it."

The trio is acutely conscious that remaining a vital force requires continuing to stretch their identity well beyond being a Bob Wills/Django Reinhardt tribute band, as timelessly appealing as the old stuff is. "We'll have to wait to reveal it, but I feel personally that we have made a lot of records that are similar to each other," James says. On "Ghost Train," "We had got more attention because we had written a lot of songs ourselves," she says. "At this point, we haven't made the record that I feel that is within us, and it will have a more diverse, eclectic feel to it."

"You don't want to make the same record over and over," Smith agrees. "Most people who like the Hot Club of Cowtown's music, they'll still like (the new record). Not like it'll be screaming distortion," but there will be some changes. "For one thing, we have drums! It's subtle though, mostly brushes. We never lose touch with swing or jazz. It's in our DNA, so it's got to come out."

Whatever happens, they'll keep touring near and far, ambassadors of a unique musical territory where the prairie meets the bistro.

San Diego swing?

The kernel of what would become the Hot Club of Cowtown came into being in 1994 in, of all places, New York City, when Whit Smith – who was born in Connecticut and raised in Cape Cod, Mass. – answered an ad in the Village Voice placed by Elana James (then known as Elana Fremerman), a classically trained violinist from Kansas City who was looking to get into a working band. Smith was an aspiring musician who had been knocking around a few rock bands in New York before getting turned on to Bob Wills and other Western swing avatars while working a day job at Tower Records.

"She was young and enthusiastic and had a lot of energy," Smith says, "and we'd get together every weekend and play Texas fiddle tunes. I would get these weird cassettes through mail-order, people like Buddy Thompson, some of these old fiddlers. Elana would play the same songs I would; we would work on these tunes and then we'd go down to the park and play. We were pursuing trying to get this Western Swing band together. Over six months, it became an 11-piece band," called Western Caravan. "We had a Monday night residency at the Rodeo Bar; we played there for two years and we never missed a residency.

"Then Elana decided she wanted to hit the road, so she joined a country band touring around Colorado. Long story short, I pursued that (too). I met her in Colorado and we were going to go to Austin, but I also at the same time had a friend with a beach house in San Diego." So after a year of busking in a San Diego park as a trio with their first bass player, they decamped for Austin in December 1997 as Hot Club of Cowtown. (The band's name is a nod to the Quintette of the Hot Club of France, the famed '30s European jazz group that included Grappelli and Reinhardt.)

Just as young artists who migrate to New York City in search of fame, fortune and creative fulfillment bring an immigrant's energy, hunger and resourcefulness to the table, people who decide to become Austinites come because they see – or imagine – a city that will let them be themselves and add their own twists to the local traditions.

"After we had spent a year (in San Diego) on the beach and jamming with a lot of great old-timers we used to spend a great deal of time with," James says, "we realized we wanted to get the trio up and running and hit the road. It sounded funny to say 'Western Swing from San Diego' to us, and we knew people in Austin who seemed to like it. Also, I knew (legendary Western swing fiddler and ex-Texas Playboy) Johnny Gimble lived in Dripping Springs. Basically, that was enough for me. But it was really Austin's reputation, and I have always loved Texas. Texas had always seemed an elegant and exotic place. Which it is.

"We've had as good a reception here as anyone could have ever hoped for. Ray Benson sure isn't from here, and neither is Jerry Jeff Walker. Austin will love you if you carry the torch of Texas tradition, and I really appreciate that about Texas. It's a really lucky thing. I think Austin has been great to us, and it's nice to be based here."

— Wes Eichenwald

Hot Club of Cowtown's next two Austin shows celebrate its Aug. 19 CD release.

Aug. 27:6:30 p.m. Happy Hour show at the Continental Club, 1315 S. Congress Ave. 441-2444; continentalclub.com. No cover.

Aug. 28:5 p.m. Waterloo Records in-store. 600A N. Lamar Blvd. 474-2500; waterloorecords.com.

More on Hot Club of Cowtown at the band's MySpace page: www.myspace.com/hotclubofcowtown