(Adapted from STRINGS Magazine, August 2007)

You know that your star has assumed its place in the fiddle firmament when Willie Nelson calls with a session date and you have to sigh and reply, Geez, I'm sorry, but I'm already booked with Bob Dylan. As it turns out, even Dylan has to get in line now for Elana James, whose self-titled solo debut on her own Snarf label heralds her emergence from the Hot Club of Cowtown toward a more elevated and risky autonomy.

If you're a girl and you like to sing and play the violin, there could be a space for you with practically any band on earth, she admits. But there seem to be fewer and fewer female instrumentalists who lead their own bands, so it's very cool that this opportunity has opened for me to do what I want.

And what exactly would that be? Judging from Elana James, the list ranges from two-beat variations on Parisian swing (Twenty-Four Hours a Day) and old-school country (Dylan's One More Night), to updated square-dance numbers, executed with crisp vocal and instrumental harmonies (Goodbye Liza Jane), new material set to a haunting, drone-based Appalachian feel (All the World and I), plus a few jazz tunes, both classic (I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good), Memories of You) and obscure (I Don't Mind). That's a plateful, but James serves it with brio.

Young, yet seasoned by experience, she was born to a violinist mother near Kansas City and schooled on Suzuki from age five. James detoured briefly to Barnard en route to earning a degree in Eastern religions, and she discovered western swing through lessons with violinist Marty Laster while in New York. This led her to study the jazz violin styles of Stuff Smith, Joe Venuti, and St'phane Grappelli. After that, she ventured to San Diego, where she and Whit Smith founded the Hot Club of Cowtown. Critics singled her out on their five albums and at their shows; more critically, so did Dylan, for whom the band opened during his tour with Willie Nelson. When Dylan hit the road again in the spring of '05, she was in his band.


James ended up doing three tours with Dylan, who gave her a prominent place in the show both as an opening act and as a featured instrumentalist in his own band, which allowed her to absorb the most important lesson the experience had to offer. “One thing I realized when I was playing in Bob Dylan’s band was that what we were doing was what everyone is doing, just at a higher level,” she says. “You write some songs, you teach them to people, and then you tour around and play them for other people. He’s had unparalleled success, and he’s peerless in what he does, and yet he’s still off doing exactly the same thing as everyone else. That was a revelation to me. And it made me realize that if I started my own thing, there’s a lot of dignity in just doing it; you don’t have to worry about who you’re playing for, you don’t have to worry about how it’s received, you just have to do it.”

The end result—or, more precisely, the first fruits of that realization—can be heard on "Elana James," Elana's July 24, 2007 debut (Snarf/Redeye). Made with some of the best of Austin’s fabled swing and country players, and featuring a guest appearance on two instrumentals by Gimble, who came to the studio on his 80th birthday, "Elana James" is a seamless blend of old and new—the former represented by a half-dozen standards, the latter by an equal number of originals that explore new variations on the western swing and string jazz she loves, as well as by “All The World And I,” a shimmering, almost other-worldly song that marks a different direction.

Elana and her trio--nowdays often comprised of former Hot Clubbers Whit Smith and Jake Erwin with occasional guests--have been touring non-stop in support of the CD and have most recently been featured at the 2007 Fuji Rock Festival in Japan and at several North American festivals in including a return engagement at the National Folk Festival, the Great Lakes Folk Festival, and at the Shetland Folk Festival and the Fiddles on Fire festival at the Sage Gateshead in the UK. As a member of the Hot Club of Cowtown, in the fall of 2006 Elana went on a tour of the Caucuses and was proud to be a member of the first American band ever to tour in Azerbaijan.

"It was fantastic to watch people doing their traditional dances to 'Buffalo Gals,'' she says, laughing. 'I have an opportunity now to develop not just as a modern incarnation of that energy but as something deeper than that. It's exciting to start fresh with that energy and stay open to wherever it leads."