Tall Tales

One of the great things about the drummerless hot jazz/Western swig trio Hot Club of Cowtown is that you often can’t tell the originals from the standards: fiddler Elana James’ composition “Darling You and I Are Through” could have been written in the 1940s as easily as in the 1990s, and the same goes for guitarist Whit Smith’s “When I Lost You.” They fit in perfectly with the Bob Wills rags, the vintage R&B, and the honky-tonking country novelty numbers that fill out this high-energy program.