Blog

Wall Street Journal includes Elana’s new album “Black Beauty” in “6 Retro Roots Albums to Jump-Start Your Summer”

Best known as a co-founder of the Hot Club of Cowtown, the band that marries Bob Wills Texas swing and Django Reinhardt era jazz, Ms. James is more a singing, swinging Grappelli- and Venuti-influenced violinist than a breakdown fiddler, which serves her well on this set. Her smooth, sweet string-vocal combination is applied—along with jazz piano here, steel guitar there—to material ranging from the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” to Goebel Reeves’s “Hobo’s Lullaby” and the Peggy Lee/Benny Goodman “All I Need Is You.” Genre distinctions collapse. The rootsier songs all become entries in the jazzy Great American Songbook.

See original article here.