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by Baker Rorick Guitar Magazine, October 1999 "I listened to nothing but Van Halen and that kind of stuff for a long time," says Whit Smith. "My friends from 15 years ago are in shock. 'What happened to him?'" An infatuation with "hot guitar" is what happened, and the Hot Club of Cowtown -- playing hot jazz and western swing -- is the result. The Austin, TX-based trio of guitarist Smith, violinist Elana Fremerman, and Billy Horton on upright bass play vocal (all three sing) and instrumental arrangements of fiddle tunes, country jazz, minor swing, heart-ache ballads, and Tin Pan Alley standards. Working in such tradition, the HCoC can burn, playing fast and furious driving rhythms at break-neck pace, and the wild abandon of Whit's fleet-fingered solos improvised over dangerous changes can leave a listener slack-jawed and winded. Smith, 35, grew up playing rock guitar in New England before moving to New York City in 1989. A musical epiphany occurred in '91, when he first heard the hillbilly jazz of Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West ("lots of dexterity and tons of musicality and a lot of wild ideas"); the western swing of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys ("driving, simple rhythm, structure, really pretty melodies, harmony and arrangement possibilities galore, and you could solo your brains out all over it"); and then saw Danny Gatton ("unbelievable") -- all in the same week. He eventually formed the Western Caravan, an 11-piece band with twin fiddles, which he led for four years. Leaving New York, Whit teamed up with violinist Fremerman, a Western Caravan alumna, in San Diego in '96 and began exploring the "pre-western swing canon of early American jazz." Relocating to Austin in '97, they hooked up with Billy Horton as the HCoC. Constant touring has followed critical acclaim for their first CD, Swingin' Stampede, and appearances on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion and at Lincoln Center's Midsummer Nights Swing series. Smith plays an all-original 1925 Gibson L-5 archtop with a varnish finish, strung with .012 or .013 bronzewounds. "It's the best acoustic I've ever had, but I think of it as an electric." He attaches a '40s DeArmond archtop pickup, minus controls and mounting bracket, to the L-5's top with a dab of office putty: "DeArmonds are very dynamic. Strum it light, they're quiet and clean; punch it really hard, they're loud and dirty." Then he plugs straight into a 1953 Fender Pro Amp, "maybe 15 or 20 watts," with a 15-inch speaker for gigs, or a '50s Fender Princeton (4 1/2 watts, 8-inch speaker) for recording and live radio broadcasts. The Hot Club of Cowtown's new CD, Tall Tales (HighTone Records) was recorded on a four-day break in April, live in the studio with vintage microphones for an authentic sound, and with guest appearances from jazz cornetist Peter Ecklund, and HCoCs first four originals. "We're trying to get the mix of songs to be like something a Texas dance band from the '30s would have played, so we wanted our own tunes to sound contemporary with that period." Constantly stretching his reach and abilities, Smith says he took a lot of chances on Tall Tales, just going for it with newfound techniques and approaches. While his fluidity and confidence put him in a league with his idols and influences, Whit says he's still on a learning curve. "Technically, I'm probably a little green to be doing some of that stuff," he says. "Hopefully, on the next record I'll be a little stronger and improvement can be shown." |