Since its beginnings in the late 1990s, the Hot Club of Cowtown’s star has continued to rise as its reputation for jaw-dropping virtuosity and unforgettable live shows has become the band’s global brand. Lauded for its “down-home melodies and exuberant improvisation” (The Times, London), the Hot Club has always woven a combination of seemingly disparate styles together to its own magical effect, setting up camp “at that crossroads where country meets jazz and chases the blues away” (The Independent), remaining “conscious always that above all else, the music is for dancing and an old-fashioned good time” (New York Times). The band’s musical alchemy has been described as “another breathless journey in the Texas tardis” (The Times, London), while American Songwriter observed that “the excellent three players of this band could be doing anything but have chosen to honor the greats of jazz and swing with their sound.” The Belfast Telegraph calls the Hot Club of Cowtown “a pretty much perfect country trio at the very top of their game,” and the New York Times, in a live review says the trio is armed with “an arsenal full of technique and joy.”

The Hot Club of Cowtown has toured extensively worldwide for over twenty years, both on its own and with artists including Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Gatemouth Brown, the Avett Brothers, Dan Hicks, Bryan Ferry, Roxy Music, the Squirrell Nut Zippers, the Mavericks, the Dustbowl Revival, and others.  Festivals/career highlights include the Women in Jazz series (part of Jazz at Lincoln Center), the Cambridge Folk Festival (UK), the Glastonbury Festival (UK), the Fuji Rock Festival (Japan), Byron Bay Blues & Roots Festival (AU), the National Folk Festival (US and AU), the Stagecoach Festival, the Winnipeg Folk Festival (CA), Waiting for Waits Festival (SP), the grand opening of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, The Barns at Wolf Trap, the Rochester Jazz Festival, the Strawberry Festival, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, traveling as US State Department Musical Ambassadors to Azerbaijan, Armenia, Algeria, the Republic of Georgia, and the Sultanate of Oman, and being inducted into the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame.

Elana James grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas and began playing Suzuki violin at age four. Her mother is a professional violinist who used to play in the Kansas City Symphony. It took James almost twenty years to decide between the violin and the fiddle, but in her mid-twenties, after much soul searching, James found her calling in American roots music and has never looked back.

In 2006, performing with the Hot Club of Cowtown, James had the honor of representing the U.S. State Department as a Musical Ambassador throughout Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan playing everything from Texas hoedowns to American Songbook standards. She has been a featured guest on A Prairie Home Companion, the Grand Ol’ Opry, the Women in Jazz series at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and at festivals and concerts throughout the world, including the Glastonbury Festival in England, the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, Australia’s Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival, the Rochester Jazz Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage and the Cambridge Folk Festival. In 2005 James became the first dedicated female instrumentalist in Bob Dylan’s touring band in more than thirty years, then toured with him in 2006 as the opening act for his United States summer tour. In addition to tours and recording with Bob Dylan, James has also recorded with Willie Nelson, Ray Price, and Merle Haggard to name only a few. In 2004 she was inducted, with her Hot Club band mates, into the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame.

James graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Comparative Religion from Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York while studying violin and viola at the Manhattan School of Music as a student of Lucie Robert and Karen Ritscher. James is also a veteran horse wrangler and world traveler. She studied Dhrupad, an early form of North Indian Classical music, with Pandit Vidhur Malik in Brindavan, India. Editorial jobs in New York City in the 1990s were punctuated by several summers at ranches in northern Colorado where James worked as a horse packer and wrangler and playing fiddle in a cowboy band. James is an alumna of the Meadowmount School of Music, the New York Youth Symphony, The Columbia University Chamber Music Program, the New York String Orchestra Seminar with Alexander Schneider and the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France.

Whit Smith was born in Greenwich, Connecticut and spent his earliest years in New Canaan, Connecticut and later Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Born to musical parents Whit was exposed right away to a life of practicing and performing. Says Smith, “My mom and dad used to sing and play folk music every night after my dad got home from work. Every weekend my dad would spend hours sitting in front of the record player figuring out rural blues tunes by Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt. Then for a couple of years he was really big on Manitas De Plata and flamenco guitar. I still have his old records with all the notes and diagrams he drew out for himself.” By his early twenties, Smith had moved to New York City, where he went on to spend the next fifteen years and his most formative years in music.

Though originally self-taught on the guitar, by the time he was a teenager Smith had realized the advantages to taking lessons. He began studying with numerous teachers including guitarist Bill Connors who had been playing with Chick Corea, and, for a time, studied classical piano in Wellfleet with Dowell Multer who first introduced him to the rigors of harmony, melody, and chordal voicings.

Beginning in 1992 Smith studied for two years in New York City with veteran New York guitarist Richard Lieberson focusing on American guitar styles from traditional jazz forms to Western and pre-1970s country. He would apply these lessons as quickly as he learned them at his weekly shows in New York City. In 1994 Smith started The Western Caravan, a thirteen-piece Western Swing orchestra, which continues to play to this day, everything from hoedowns to country to jazzy arrangements with triple fiddles and steel guitar. It was during this time that Smith met violinist Elana James, through an ad in the music section of the Village Voice, and ultimately began the band Hot Club of Cowtown with James, which has been his passion and chief focus since the group released its first recordings in 1998.

Zack Sapunor is from Sacramento, California and claims lineage from the Western swing scene that began when Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys made their home there in the late 1940s. He has toured and recorded with Austin’s Wayne “The Train” Hancock, and is a veteran of traditional jazz cornetist Jim Cullum’s band (of NPR’s “Riverwalk Jazz” renown), in San Antonio, Texas.

Though he is what most would consider “self-taught,” Sapunor has learned first-hand from slap bass masters in New Orleans, Chicago, and Austin, including alumni of the very Hot Club he has now joined. Growing up as a kid in the 1980s, Sapunor’s first love was hip-hop, then as a teenager he played in garage bands picking up bass guitar as his uncles did before him. Eventually transitioning to upright bass, he immersed himself in roots music and rockabilly, leading him to the “slap” bass tradition and his discovery of Western swing.

For his musical development Sapunor also credits stints working at the original Tower Records and then at world-famous Amoeba Music while studying music and theatre at Sacramento City College and San Francisco State University. Theatre credits include Always…Patsy Cline at Sacramento Theatre Company (2010), most of 2016 on a Caribbean tour of Million Dollar Quartet, and the title role in Woody Guthrie’s American Song (2002) at City Theatre where he has also had a half-dozen of his own original plays produced.

Prior to joining the Hot Club of Cowtown in the summer of 2020, Sapunor has been a featured soloist performing Western swing with the Sweet & Low Melody Co., hot jazz with Jazz Gitan, and singing and writing for his own Tropicali Flames, a swing, doo-wop, and Latin-influenced R&B quartet.

A seasoned live performer Sapunor has played bass for Texas roots maven Rosie Flores, original Sun Records legends Sleepy LaBeef and WS Holland, as well as GRAMMY-winner Arturo Sandoval. He continues to enjoy club, theatre, and studio sessions averaging over 200 dates per year and is thrilled and honored to take the stage with his Hot Club of Cowtown bandmates.

From portraying Elvis Presley in Walk the Line and garnering a cult following as musician Chris Keller on the CW hit TV show One Tree Hill, to writing and touring with the likes of Taylor Swift, Lady Antebellum and Joe Cocker, Tyler Hilton has enjoyed an award-winning career spanning music, film and television.

Born and raised in California, Hilton grew up in a family of talented musicians who had played for acts like Fleetwood Mac, George Harrison and Donovan. Performing with his family from an early age, Hilton became serious about songwriting at 14. At 15, he called into L.A.’s KLOS radio station to win concert tickets and ended up wowing the hosts with an on-air performance. The station made him a regular guest and helped launch his debut record, which caught the ear of Warner Bros. Records, who signed him to record his second album The Tracks of Tyler Hilton, earning him two Top 40 singles.

Hilton then landed the dream gig of portraying Elvis in Golden Globe-winning Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, opposite Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix. “I’d never done any kind of professional acting, but got quite the education from those two. They were pros, and so patient.” Two of his recordings featured on the film’s Grammy-winning soundtrack and his portrayal of the late legend helped launch an acting career which has since seen him star alongside Robert Downey Jr. in the 2007 film Charlie Bartlett and opposite Halle Berry in CBS series Extant.

However, it was Hilton’s musical role in One Tree Hill that helped build the devoted, global fan base he has today. The series heavily featured songs from his third album, 2012’s Forget the Storm, which reached #2 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Albums Chart. Hilton also featured on the show’s soundtracks with fan favorites like “When the Stars Go Blue” and “Missing You.” “I played the worst kind of person on the show, and still the fans totally took me in and connected with my music. It was an incredible fan base to be a part of!”

Following 2014’s Indian Summer, Hilton released his proudest body of work yet, 2019’s City on Fire, featuring a collaboration with Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley (an ex-roommate). The album, rooted in Hilton’s signature cinematic folk-rock stylings, was featured heavily in film and TV including Showtime’s Shameless. The star-studded video for the record’s gritty lead single, “City on Fire,” was directed by Hilton’s wife, Megan Park, an award-winning director, writer and actress. A video for the album’s second single, “When I See You, I See Home,” features footage of the couple’s 2015 nuptials and their baby daughter, Winnie, born in 2019.

Alongside working on his retro-inspired 6th studio album (expected Spring 2021) which will include a dark take on Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” – released in early 2020, following the singer’s death – Hilton and longtime collaborator Jaco Caraco (Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson) have been writing and producing new music for Billy Ray Cyrus’ soon-to-be released follow up to 2019’s record-shattering “Old Town Road.”

Hilton has been featured everywhere from Rolling Stone and People’s “50 Most Beautiful People,” to The Tonight Show and TRL. Additionally, he co-starred in a #1 MTV music video with Taylor Swift, a longtime fan, for her song, “Teardrops Drops on My Guitar,” which was nominated for an MTV Music Video Award. Hilton and Park also starred in the #1 CMT music video for Gloriana’s “Kissed You Goodnight.”

Hilton currently lives in Los Angeles and Ontario, Canada.

See more on Hilton at www.tylerhilton.com and on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook