Hot Club of Cowtown with Jon Shain

Austin-based Hot Club of Cowtown has grown to be the most globe-trotting, hardest-swinging Western swing trio on the planet. They have created an international cult following for their brand of western swing and le jazz hot — a sonic personification of joy and unique sound. ¶ Jon Shain opens the show. Fans of great fingerstyle blues guitar will love this performer.

YOU’D THINK a band from Austin, Texas with the word “Cowtown” in its name spends its time off from touring herding cattle at a West Texas ranch or maybe in Nashville writing songs about whiskey and loose women. Not the Hot Club of Cowtown. “We recently took a band vacation to the Gypsy Festival at St. Maries de la Mer in the South of France,” says the band’s fiddler and vocalist, Elana James. Whit Smith, Hot Club’s guitar player and vocalist, is a regular at the prestigious Djangofest Northwest in Whidbey, Island, Washington, and bass player Jake Erwin has the Hungarian folk band Csokolom in regular rotation on his home stereo.

“Our band is fiddle, guitar, and bass, and they can do anything together. We’ve always played a combination of hot jazz and Western swing, but it’s been really a joy to finally distill part of our essence and serve up a record that is purely jazzy,” says James, who in fact was once a horse wrangler in Colorado, as well as a former student of classical music at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France. Says Smith, “Once Elana became aware that in jazz music and swing, you could express yourself more in improvisation, I think that attracted her to it. She still likes classical, and I do too.” Smith grew up hearing his parents play lots of folk music, especially acoustic blues, but as a teenager he naturally rebelled and turned sharply toward hard rock, which still informs his approach to hot jazz and Western swing. The impression that the band is in some way a country act, especially in the current climate of American popular music, is somewhat misleading since the Hot Club’s influences have always been as much the musette music of the smoky bistros of 1930s Paris as they are the hoedowns and Western swing of the mythic American West.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the Hot Club of Cowtown, whose collection of recorded work now stretches to seven studio albums, is finally releasing Rendezvous in Rhythm, a thrilling display of this Texas trio’s breathtaking virtuosity and, for the first time with such focus, its elegant, more European inspirations. “We had lots of people asking us to make a record of standards,” says Smith, “So there you go, here’s a record full of swing standards. We’re not trying to compete with anyone who’s writing the songs. It’s more of a vehicle for one way we really like to play — starting with familiar ground and then improvising from there.”

Since its beginnings in the late 1990s, Hot Club of Cowtown’s star has continued to rise as its reputation for jaw-dropping virtuosity and earth-shattering live shows has become the band’s global brand. With the release ofRendezvous in Rhythm, Hot Club of Cowtown invites us to join in once again on a journey through its musical inspirations, where the campfire is still burning, but this time the lights of Paris twinkle in the distance, the Gypsy caravans are gathered round, and the night air is filled with magic and romance.

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Jon Shain grew up in Haverhill, Mass., where he began to discover his love of American roots music and songwriting, specifically drawn to the narratives about regular people and themes of social justice. He headed south to North Carolina in 1986 to study American history at Duke University and to continue his musical journey as well. He had the good fortune to learn the Piedmont blues tradition firsthand by playing in Big Boy Henry’s backing band. It was at this time that Shain also got to meet and play with John Dee Holeman and a number of the great older NC blues players. That mixture of the academic environment and the real-world blues music is what has most informed his musical direction.

Shain cut his touring teeth from 1989–1998 founding the Chapel Hill, NC folk-rock group, Flyin’ Mice and their spin-off group, WAKE. The band released four CDs and played clubs, schools, and festivals up and down the East Coast, building a legion of fans. After his band’s breakup, Shain went solo, returning to his roots in the folk and blues circuit. He has released six studio albums. In addition to festival slots and headlining club dates he stays busy giving private instruction in Piedmont blues fingerstyle guitar, and teaching group workshops in songwriting and blues guitar.