Hot Club of Cowtown singer and violinist — and KC native — Elana James on her band’s latest, Rendezvous in Rhythm

“I think this creepy obsession with new, new, new, personal ‘I wrote it’ stuff is a kind of plague on American traditional music,” Elana James tells The Pitch. “What’s wrong with reinterpreting traditional melodies or, in our case, standards and traditional songs from the early part of the 20th century, in an absolutely current, sincere and thrilling way?”

James is referring to her band, the Hot Club of Cowtown, and its latest album, Rendezvous in Rhythm — a 1930s ringer that gathers traditional western swing and Django Reinhardt-ish standards. Apart from a three-year hiatus in the mid-’00s, the Austin trio (James, vocals and fiddle; Whit Smith, vocals and guitar; Jake Erwin, vocals and bass) has been charming crowds with its virtuoso hot-jazz and swing sound since 1998. On Saturday, Hot Club of Cowtown returns to James’ hometown (she grew up in Prairie Village) for a show at Knuckleheads Saloon. (The 10 p.m. show is sold out, but an early show — in Knuckleheads’ intimate, 60-seat Living Room — has been added.) We dialed up James last week to chat about it.

The Pitch: You grew up in Kansas City, then moved to New York, where you were part of a kind of arty downtown scene.

James: I wouldn’t say I was part of an arty downtown scene. I did grow up in a kind of bohemian way in Kansas City. My mom and former stepdad were in the Kansas City Symphony, and they also played for lots of traveling shows that would come through town — Pippin, the opera. My sister and I used to go to all the symphony concerts, back in the Russ Patterson and Bill McGlaughlin eras, and hang out backstage. We saw all the operas, all the perfomances of Alexander Nevsky, Cindy Siebert’s Friends of Chamber Music series. Maxim Shostakovich’s son, Dmitri [the pianist], once came and conducted the KC Symphony, and I had a huge crush on him when I was, like, 9.

In New York City, after college, I met Whit through an ad in The Village Voice. He had been working at Matt Umanov Guitars, in the West Village, kind of the epicenter of rock and hipster guitar activity. Whit played on one of Patti Smith’s records around that time, [in the] early 1990s, and I was working as the managing editor at a Buddhist magazine called Tricycle. We started playing in clubs in the East Village and had a band for a while, but it was too big to sustain in New York, so we left town and relaunched ourselves as a duo, and soon after a trio, in 1997. That’s how the band got started.

The new record, Rendezvous in Rhythm, is all standards, no originals. Is there a reason you went that route?

Well, there are original arrangements and interpretations. We’ve been a band for 15 years and put out many kinds of records. The last record was a collection of western-swing tunes. With this one, we wanted to do a companion piece and explore the Left Bank, gypsy-jazz side of our influences. But live, it’s pretty much the same show — lots of originals we’ve written mixed with standards.

You’ve been mining your sound for a pretty long time now. Do you feel like lately there are more bands trying to take a crack at that sound?

Well, when you say our sound, what do you mean?

Kind of a folky, jazzy, nostalgic, revival type of thing.

Yeah … well, that description of our band makes me cringe a little bit. The thing about us is, throughout the entire time we’ve been a band, we’ve been on the cusp of larger movements in the music industry that really we’re only marginally related to, like in the ’90s, with the swing revival — Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Brian Setzer Orchestra. We do swing but nothing remotely like that. Then later, there was a trend with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with acoustic harmonies and all that. We’re an electric trio, so again, not us. And now there’s this Mumford and Sons, Avett Brothers thing going on — soulful, acoustic roots music. We’re more vintage than that. So even though we do share some traits with some of these bands, nobody really does what we do. And I feel like when people write about us, they miss that.

What are they missing?

It’s hard to describe what we do because there just aren’t a lot of bands — really any — doing exactly what we do. It’s kind of like bread. Some form of the baguette has been around in France for hundreds of years. Does that somehow make it dated? When songs or a style of music or a particular genre are great, they are simply great. When an orchestra performs a Beethoven symphony or a string quartet plays Mozart, there is not this obsession with “retro” or the sense of a “cover.” There is only the recognition of great music and that people love to hear and play it.

Our music basically sounds like if you were out driving in Texas during the late 1930s, just before WWII, and pulled over to a dance at someone’s house or at a local dance hall. That’s about the style we’d be playing: smokin’ fiddle tunes, early blues, standards, hot jazz, ballads, reels, fiery minor European folk melodies, our own songs in that vein. Many bands were into this very popular style back at that time: the Light Crust Doughboys, Hugh and Karl Farr, Milton Brown and Cliff Bruner on the western end of the spectrum, and Stuff Smith, Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli on the more hot-jazz side. We like to imagine that we are playing essentially as contemporaries of them in this style, not trying to ape what they did …

So you don’t like the idea of being considered a throwback act?

We’re not a throwback act. We’re extremely current. We just draw on music that isn’t fashionable or mainstream. I think of us as more like a punk band, as coming from a kind of eccentric urban context. Like, last week Patti Smith played here in Austin, and Whit sat in with her. We don’t treat the music like some kind of retro folkie undertaking in any way whatsoever. I mean, I noticed the Red Elvises are playing the same night as us at Knuckleheads. Their show is electrifying and really thrilling, and I think we have a lot more in common with them than a lot of bands we sometimes will get lumped in with.

Can you explain what you mean when you say you think of Hot Club of Cowtown as a punk band?

Well, the band really got started because we love to play. If we were playing electric guitars and had Marshall stacks, we’d have been a rock band, but we were playing fiddle and acoustic guitar. But the energy is the same. [It’s] that compulsion to play, the magic that happens when three people who are very different but somehow on the same page musically come together to make something bigger than the sum of their parts.