The Hot Club of Cowtown
hot jazz/western swing trio
The Hot Club of Cowtown is an American Western swing trio that formed in 1997.
History
The band's name comes from two sources: "Hot Club" from the hot jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli's Quintette du Hot Club de France, and "Cowtown" from the western influence of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and other early Western swing combos, as well as the band's love of fiddle tunes, hoedowns, and songs of the American west.
Whit Smith (from Cape Cod, Massachusetts) and Elana James (from Prairie Village, Kansas) met through an ad in the classified music section of The Village Voice in 1994. They played together in New York City before moving to San Diego in 1997, where they spent a year playing for tips and building up their repertoire. In 1998 they moved to Austin, Texas and two years later added Jake Erwin (from Tulsa, Oklahoma) on bass.
The band split briefly in 2005, though they reunited for occasional shows in 2005–07, 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 and began performing with her own trio later in 2005. Smith and James resumed playing together full-time in 2006 and by early 2008 the Hot Club of Cowtown had officially re-formed.
In the summer of 2020, upright bass player Jake Erwin retired from the band and was replaced by Zack Sapunor, who was with the band until mid-2023.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14158734. VIAF identifies the subject as 139882733. The Library of Congress control number is no2001031711. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 1994, 1998 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Hot Club of Cowtown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.