Hot Club of Cowtown: Its history is as unusual as its music

By Walter Tunis Contributing Music Writer

To appreciate the current game plan of Hot Club of Cowtown, you have to review some previous box scores.

First, there was the dispersal. After seven years, five albums and who knows how many performances, the Austin, Texas, trio disbanded.

But when Cowtown fiddler Elana James later hit the road to support a self-titled debut album, she thought of no finer guitar foil for her band than longtime Cowtown mate Whit Smith. When James' bassist then moved to Chicago, she signed up stringman Jake Erwin, who just happened to be the bass player on Hot Club's final two albums.

Then the realization hit. The band that James had on the road was the very Cowtown lineup that busted up in the first place.

”We had been playing ­together, the three of us, under my name for nearly a year,“ James said. ”After a while, it was like, "We should call ourselves what we really are.“

Thus began what she terms the ”relaunching“ of Hot Club of Cowtown, which James and Smith had formed in 1997 as a nexus between the 1930s and '40s Western swing adventures of Bob Wills and the pre-World War II ”hot jazz“ music pioneered in Europe by gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and French violinist Stephane Grappelli in the Quintette du Hot Club de France.

Adding Erwin in 2002 for Hot Club of Cowtown's album Ghost Train was like giving ”a shot of espresso“ to the trio's sound, Smith says.

”It's a rare thing for the three of us to have musically developed when and where and how we did,“ he said. ”Somewhere in all of that, there was just a connection. We were coming from more of the same place than just the fact we have a lot of the same records.“

Relentless touring in the wake of Ghost Train yielded a sublime concert album (2003's Continental Stomp), but it also saw friction in the band ranks. But the resulting split came without lasting animosity.

”We got to the bottom of everybody's character and saw that we still liked each other,“ James said.

The reconvened Hot Club of Cowtown returns to Lexington on Sunday as the last officially scheduled band to play The Dame. The trio will stay over to perform for The ­WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour on Monday.

Then on Aug. 19, the Shout Factory label will release a 20-song anthology assembled from the band's five albums with Hightone. Titled The Best of the Hot Club of Cowtown, the album is a mix of originals (Smith's ­Emily and James' Secret of Mine), standards (Stardust), swing ­favorites (the Wills staple Ida Red) and global string ­summits (Fuli Tschai). There also is a Ghost Town cover of the 1970s-era Aerosmith obscurity Chip Away the Stone that wraps three-part harmonies around Smith's guitar-vocal lead.

”I always think you should be allowed to play the music you like,“ Smith said. ”We're very lucky in that we get to do that. Some people get so tired of the ­material they're forced to play. I mean, could you imagine writing Margaritaville and then have to play it every night?“

A new studio album for 2009 also is in the works. It will feature predominantly original music, but the Cowtown crew already has recorded another intriguing cover: the Tom Waits nugget Long Way Home, from his album Orphans.

”The thing that's cool is we don't really sound like anybody,“ James said. ”We don't sound like Stephane Grappelli. We don't sound like Bob Wills. We've been inspired by that stuff, but we're not aping it at all. This is a band with a sound of its own

”Whether we're playing an ­Aerosmith song or a ballad by the Hot Club of France, to have consistent character throughout the music is something I'm very proud of.“