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The Hot Club of Cowtown is a hot jazz/western swing trio, comprising; Elana Fremerman (now known as Elana James), Whit Smith, and slap bass player Jake Erwin, who also sing in three-part harmony. Smith (Cape Cod, MA) and James (Prairie Village, KS), originally met through an ad in the classified music section of The Village Voice in 1994, and played together in New York City before relocating to San Diego in 1997, where they spent a year playing for tips and building up their repertoire. By 1998, they relocated to Austin, Texas and in 2000 added Jake Erwin (originally from Tulsa, OK) on bass, finalizing the Hot Club’s lineup. Since their first recording in 1998, Austin-based Hot Club of Cowtown have become a hard-swinging Western swing trio. The first American band to tour Azerbaijan, they have opened for such artists as Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson and continue to bring their brand of western swing to a wide range of festival audiences all over the world, but it has always been about staying true to their roots. Remaining willfully out of the musical mainstream, Hot Club of Cowtown have created a cult following. Their name is inspired by: “Hot Club” from the hot jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli’s Hot Club of France, and “Cowtown” from the western influence of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and the band's love of fiddle tunes, hoedowns, and songs of the American west. "Cowtown" is not a place but a state of mind. Wills’ and Brown's pre-WWII recordings have always inspired Hot Club of Cowtown’s repertoire and style. “This is music from the days when guys toured and sat on a bus with no air conditioning, no real food, for days. We heard a story of a fiddler the Wills band picked up in California and by the time they had driven to the Midwest, he was dead and nobody even knew his name. They pried his rigor mortis’d body off of the bus and left him under a lamppost somewhere in Kansas,” says James, “It was a different time. These guys were pretty hardcore. ” Hot Club spend most of their time touring, crisscrossing the USA. Local traditions are becoming more diluted, and modern life more electronic, which has concentrated the trio upon keeping their music sincere, free of irony, and focused on a simpler time. “We have faith in the system that is the band. This energy that we plug into and it takes us away,” says James. Smith describes their shows as “like a rock ’n’ roll show . . . people pick up on the energy and the sincerity. ” “What the trio has is a rare thing,” says Smith, “There’s a chemistry that’s unmistakable. ” Hot Club of Cowtown split in 2005, though they reunited for occasional shows in 2006-07, including the Fuji Rock Festival and a tour of Australia as Elana James & The Hot Club of Cowtown, in 2007. Whit Smith performed as Whit Smith's Hot Jazz Caravan, based in Austin, Texas. Elana toured with Bob Dylan in 2005. Changing her last name to James, Elana began performing with her own trio in late 2005. Smith and James resumed playing together full time in 2006. By early 2008 the Hot Club of Cowtown had officially re-formed. The Hot Club's first album, 1998's Swingin' Stampede is a collection of standards, fiddle tunes, and classic Western Swing songs, including two written by Bob Wills, a major influence on the band. Their 1999 follow-up album, Tall Tales, showcases the songwriting of Smith and James with original songs, including "Darling You And I Are Through" by James, and "Emily" and "When I Lost You" by Smith, as well as more Western Swing standards by Bob Wills, Pee Wee King, and others. Later albums continued the same formula of mixing classic Western Swing and hot jazz, with originals in the same style; including the studio albums, Ghost Train (2002) and Wishful Thinking (2009). Their most recent 2011 tribute album to Bob Wills, What Makes Bob Holler, digs deeper into their roots and refuses to modernize. The disc includes obscure B-sides with some of Wills’ most popular work. Tunes like “Big Balls in Cowtown” and “Stay a Little Longer” are songs that “people always love when we play them live,” says James, “so it was was a no-brainer to gather them into a record. ” Others, like “Osage Stomp” and “The Devil Ain’t Lazy,” might not be as well known, but they are in the spirit of what originally attracted Smith and James to this music. “We’re playing what knocked us out about Western swing in the first place — the early fiery energy and jazzy improvisations,” says James. In January and February 2011, they toured with Roxy Music as the opening act on Roxy's UK leg of their For Your Pleasure tour. Festivals/career highlights include the Women in Jazz series, the Cambridge Folk Festival (UK), the Glastonbury Festival (UK), the Fuji Rock Festival (Japan), Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival (AU), the National Folk Festival (US and AU), the Stagecoach Festival, the Winnipeg Folk Festival (CA), Waiting for Waits Festival (SP), the grand opening of the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee, the Barns at Wolftrap, the Rochester Jazz Festival, the Strawberry Festival, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, traveling as US State Department Musical Ambassadors to Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, being inducted into the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame, and tours with Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and The Mavericks. The Hot Club of Cowtown has been featured on television on Later With Jools Holland and the Jools Holland New Year’s Eve Hootenanny (UK), $40 a Day with Rachael Ray (US), The Grand Ole Opry (US), BBC Live From Glastonbury broadcast (UK), Good Morning Azerbaijan. Film credits for songs include indie films Four Dead Batteries and In Search of a Midnight Kiss. United States radio appearances include Mountain Stage, Etown, World Cafe, A Prairie Home Companion, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Sirius Satellite, and XM Satellite.

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