Hot Club of Cowtown reckoned it was "quite something" to come all the way from Texas and find a sold-out crowd in Stirling.
Judging from their whoops and yee-has, the crowd thought Hot Club were quite something too.
A searing trio of gypsy jazz and western swing revivalists, Hot Club have brought their 30s hoe-downs to contemporary arenas thanks to tours with Willie Nelson and Roxy Music. But it was a standout appearance on Later With Jools Holland that bagged fiddler-vocalist Elana James, guitarist-vocalist Whit Smith and scorching double-bassist Jake Erwin their legion of vintage music fans – a fact the band acknowledged in Stirling, as they tipped their (cowboy) hats to Jools, and recreated said TV performance with the sultry-jazz standard, Deed I Do.
The trio’s three-part harmonies and congenial dynamic can be thrilling and – as their moniker suggests – their flair is equally suited to the French jazz swagger of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, and the fiery country-swing of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. They paid blistering homage to gypsy jazz with Dorado Schmitt’s Tchavolo Swing (James’s fiddle was dazzling), but Wills’s canon and influence loomed large, as it does over Hot Club’s latest album, What Makes Bob Holler.
Oklahoma Hills, She’s Killing Me and Big Ball in Cowtown followed suit.
The trio’s charms were less persuasive when pared down. No vocalist was forceful (as evinced by a trembling rendition of Tom Waits’s The Long Way Home) and their original compositions were variable (not least the prom-night country-rock of Reunion). But there’s no doubting Hot Club of Cowtown live up to their old-time, rip-roaring name.
HHH
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