Hot Club of Cowtown

Award-winning Austin, Texas-based Hot Club of Cowtown may be the world’s most globe-trotting, effervescent string trio, who’s joyful sound blends the traditional Western swing of the American southwest with European hot jazz influences of the same era. The Hot Club of Cowtown, celebrating its 21st year this season, also writes its own material and reinterprets everything from hoedowns to American songbook standards in its own, original style.

Voted Ameripolitan Western Swing Group of the Year 2015 and inducted into the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame in 2004, HCCT has toured with Bob Dylan, Roxy Music and others and represented traditional American music throughout the world for the US State Department from Azerbaijan to the Sultanate of Oman. Ten studio albums, a global following, and the relentless passion of its live shows are the band’s continuing trademark.

This trio’s stylistic genesis–as well as title–stems from the realization that the great heritage of strings (guitars and violins) originates mutually with the Manouche gypsies of France and the no-less virtuosic hillbilly pickers and fiddlers of Oklahoma and Texas….the threesome of high-heeled violinist Elana James, guitarist Whit Smith and bassist Jake Erwin showed from the beginning that jazz and country music could exist together on the same page, a highly commendable achievement if ever there was one. Wall Street Journal