Any band that references the death of legendary guitarist Eddie Lang by ill-fated tonsillectomy, they just generally get my vote. When that band makes said arcane reference preceding their performance of the odd and wonderful Joe Venuti composition “The Wild Dog” (an infectious little tune full of changes in texture and tempo), and does all of this while on the stage of the Howlin’ Wolf, a club not known for presenting bands that conjure obscurities from the late ‘20s repertoire of the “Blue Four”… I just think a band like that deserves a closer look. It’s the Hot Club of Cow Town.

Hailing from Austin, Texas, the Hot Club of Cow Town, appeared on October 14 at the Howlin’ Wolf as part of the venue’s ambitious “Deep South Sundays” series. More “Hot Club” than “Cow Town” on this particular evening, they earned further points when, after the first over-amplified number, the Western Swing classic “Ida Red,” frontman Whit Smith said “We’re just a little bitty band with a little bitty sound, why don’t you turn it down so we have to play these things.” What a great pleasure it was to hear a musician ask that the music be turned down, not only so that they have to play it, but also that the audience could really hear it. Those “things” Smith spoke of are his guitar, Elana Fremerman’s violin and the stand-up bass of Jake Erwin. They spent the evening playing them with an ebullient spirit and to great effect, offering the crowd a lovely mix of hot jazz (“Diga-Diga-Doo,” “Chinatown, My Chinatown”…), pop gems (“I Can’t Believe That Your In Love With Me,” “I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight?”…) Western Swing (“Roly Poly,” “Osage Stomp”…), old-timey fiddle tunes, as well as originals, of which a re-fashioning of the Whiteman Orchestra hit “Louisiana” into something called “Emily” was most pleasing.

That grand mix of styles and influences says a lot about this Hot Club of Cow Town, and what is says, mostly, is that they actually like music, all kinds of music. So they can shift easily from a sweet pop tune, the Dorothy Fields/Jimmy McHugh favorite,”Exactly Like You” for example, and follow it with something from the Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys repertoire like “It’s My Lazy Day” or Eddy Arnold’s “Just a Little Lovin’” and it in no way sounds forced. That’s because, as so many have said before, there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. The Hot Club of Cow Town is interested in the former.

Elana Fremerman, the sweet-voiced fiddler, is a joy to watch and listen to, and along with the other fellows, plays with a kind of joyous abandon. While originally from Prairie View, Kansas, Fremerman met up with Smith (who, because of his name, keeps making me think of the films Metropolitan and Barcelona) in New York while she was an intern at Harper’s Magazine, which is just one small part of an incredibly interesting biography, and performed with him in an eleven-piece Western Swing orchestra called the Western Caravan. The two split off and performed as a duo, moved to San Diego and finally ended up in Austin in 1997. They added a bass and were soon signed to the Oakland, California based High-Tone Records. To date they have released three compact discs, Swingin’ Stampede, Tall Tales and, most recently Dev’lish Mary.

I don’t know of any other record which includes, as Dev’lish Mary does, the following credit lines: “Camels courtesy Don Chapman, Camel Wranglers: Betty Crow and Sharon Standoff.” There, inexplicably, the Hot Club of Cow Town are on the disc’s back cover, sitting around the campfire surrounded by a herd of dromedaries. Other credit lines please as well, such as “Don Walser yodels on ‘When the Bloom is on the Sage,’” which pleases for two reasons: 1) well, I’ll take yodeling wherever I can get it, and 2) that song is my favorite among the Western tunes popularized by Bing Crosby (in a 1938 recording accompanied John Scott Trotter’s beautifully named Frying Pan Five). But by far the most pleasing of the acknowledgments is the following: “Peter Ecklund—Cornet.”

I’ve written in this space about the New York-based cornetist Ecklund before, how I thought he was a sort of alchemical genius, absorbing many influences and finding within them his own voice. Fremerman acknowledges his smarts as well: “With Peter,” she told me, “it’s hard to explain, but you feel that if you just sat quietly in the same room with him for an hour, you’d come out of the experience more intelligent.” On the handful of tunes on which he appears on Dev’lish Mary (he is also featured on their Tall Tales release) he shows a real and canny musical cunning, picking his spots, playing with great economy, playing just a few choice notes here and there. In so doing he strangely adds to the simplicity and spareness of the record. There is his jaunty mute work on Whit Smith’s original “More Than a Dream,” and his obbligato fills to Fremerman’s vocal on “You Don’t Care What Happens to Me,” but for me it is on the classic “When Day Is Done” where Ecklund’s presence is felt most deeply, where he proves himself indispensable. First he splatters little pieces of musical light around Fremerman’s melody statement on violin, and then does the same to her vocal, never getting in the way but rather providing buoyancy and lift. It’s all done with great subtlety. First-rate.

Which is not to say that the record suffers in any way without him. Hardly. Dev’lish Mary is exquisite from track one through 16. What is so compelling is how much music they get out of such small combinations, trios and quartets (there is also a steel guitar added to some tracks) and how many textures and moods are created. Of special interest for those of us who like music, the Hot Club’s aching take on Hoagy Carmichael’s eternal “Star Dust.”

Lately, when day is done and shadows fall I’ve been dreaming of the Hot Club of Cow Town. What a nice band they are. Worth your while, too.

It bears mentioning the only miss-step of the Hot Club of Cow Town’s recent New Orleans performance, although it wasn’t theirs. Let me say first that there was for reasons unbeknownst to me a large number of patrons at the Howlin’ Wolf wearing pajamas. A birthday of some sort, perhaps (from my gleanings) of someone named Wolfgang.

Cowboy Mouth’s Fred LeBlanc come on right before the Hot Club. His performance included what I might describe as a less than reverent a capella recitation of the “Star Spangled Banner,” and then went on for 15 or so more minutes with a less than reverent version of “Crazy,” guitar playing that was generally less than reverent to the guitar, and the occasional grunted expletive.

Speaking of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” while riding my trusty Western Flyer home from the club that night, and this is a true story, some large man in a large car, completely besotted after a full twelve hours of celebration of Ricky Williams’ one yard sweep to victory against Carolina, pulls up beside me and asks the question, and loudly, “Are you for Bin Laden or are you for us?” It was a scary moment did he realize that by sheer happenstance my bicycle’s color scheme is shared by the Afghani flag? “I’m for,” I said, “the Hot Club of Cow Town.”