root salad f16 Hot Club Of Cowtown
Fronting the new wave of Western swing. Jon Lusk catches up with them among the dusty tumbleweeds of Camden.
A
lot of water has flowed under the bridge since western swing/hot jazz trio Hot Club Of Cowtown last appeared in
fRoots in 1999 (see fRoots 192). They’d only been around for two years then, and shortly afterwards began to write some of their own songs rather than rely on material largely written before 1940. Since then, they’ve acquired new bass player Jake Erwin, released a string of acclaimed albums, been inducted into the Texas Western Swing Hall Of Fame, toured with Bob Dylan, taken a mid- noughties break to pursue other interests, re-formed and recorded two more highly contrasting, but equally brilliant discs.
Just hours before a fabulous pre- Halloween gig – one of the year’s best – at Dingwalls in Camden, I meet them at their hotel. The buzzing interplay and energy they radiate on stage and record is mir-
rored in a lively, three-way conversational relay. Just as they fling honed solo spots from one to another, they often interrupt and finish each other’s phrases, ranging over diverse topics, with little prompting. We meet in Whit Smith’s room where his 1937 Gibson EH 150 guitar amp (‘Made in Kalamazoo, Michigan’) makes a nice focus for a photo.
Wishful Thinking (2009) was the first of their ‘act two’ albums and showcased a broadening creativity. Aside from their usual styles, there was a lovely version of The Long Way Home by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Whit’s Carry Me Close ventured into alt country/gospel balladry, while Elana James’ Reunion married east- ern European Gypsy ambience with less obvious elements. She’s delighted when I ask about Taraf de Haïdouks, the group this song seems to reference through her use of the ‘croaking’ fiddle effect that the late Nicolae Neacsu made his trademark.
“When they came to Austin, like, 10 years ago, of course I was obsessed with them and I tracked them down and hung out at their hotel after the show. He kind of gave me an impromptu les- son in how he did that, which was he tied fish- ing twine onto the G string and put all this rosin on his thumb and forefinger and… [pulled it]. I just thought it was the coolest sound, so for that song I found a way to put that into it and also this thing I learned in India, a rag called a ghat where you play this rhythmic figure.”
The band’s latest
release, What Makes Bob Holler (2010) is an affectionate and exu- berant tribute to their primary western swing influence, Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys. Naturally, its focus is a lot narrower than Wishful Thinking, which Elana is anxious to defend:
“What I hope
doesn’t happen is peo- ple listen to it and think ‘oh well, they got back in the box!’ I don’t
think we’ve ever been in the box, we’ve never been out of it, we just do what we like, but I’m actually shocked at how diffi- cult it’s been to just play this music and not have to constantly explain and defend it!”
She likens their unlikely but effective mix of influences to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a popular American chocolate candy filled with peanut butter:
“Now, where did that idea come from? In the end nobody thinks twice about it; it works! But we are having to constantly explain why chocolate and peanut butter is not the most bizarre thought ever. And that’s been nutty!”
And don’t even think about calling their music ‘retro’.
“We’re just mining from these genres that we like and trying to interpret them in a contemporary, extremely fresh and exciting way,” insists Jake.
“And because it’s before World War
Two,” adds Elana, “everyone is like ‘retro retro retro’. If we’d been drawing on rock ‘n’ roll, it would be ‘no problem, you’re like The Killers’.”
I
“Modern music has been copying itself for – I call a ‘generation’ 10 years in music – at least four ‘generations’ if not more,” chips in Whit. “The music we play was only popular for about 10 years, and… we just skipped a couple of ‘generations’. But we don’t actually copy, although there’s some rules to aesthetics.”
f Hot Club Of Cowtown were just slavishly imitating Bob Wills, their records would be littered with the kind of mewling exhortations he did on most of his; they aren’t. Then again, there aren’t any ‘updates’ of lyrics, like changing ’Indians’ to more the politically correct ‘native Americans’ on the likes of Oklahoma Hills. It just wouldn’t scan the same way.
As well as not wanting to talk about the past, Elana refuses to discuss Bob Dylan, because everybody asks about him.
“We’re totally sick of talking about Bob Dylan”, she snarls. “He doesn’t talk about us in his interviews. There’s nothing else to say!”
“You can put that in”, chuckles Whit. “I will say it was nice touring with him. He would come over and talk to us about Bing Crosby and stuff like that. He had selected us to tour with him and we had common interests in music.”
“He had some really nice things to say about us and our band, really encouraging,” adds Jake. “Any time you hear something like that, it’s definitely good reinforcement – ‘keep doing what your doing’.”
www.hotclubofcowtown.com F
Photo: Jon Lusk
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