Audiences will enjoy an evening of music from the Greatest Generation when two young bands playing old tunes take the stage in Elgin.
The Hot Club of Cowtown and Davina and the Vagabonds present “The Finest Hour: Celebrating the Songs that Ended WWII” at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 5 at Elgin Community College in Elgin.
Davina and the Vagabonds is a New Orleans-style jazz/blues quintet hailing from the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Hot Club of Cowtown is a Western swing gypsy jazz trio from Austin, Texas.
This show will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the music of 1945 with songs from legends like Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Louie Prima, The Andrew Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Wills and more.
Davina Lozier of Davina and the Vagabonds and Elana James of Hot Club of Cowtown curated the program in 2019.
“It’s really well road-tested,” Lozier said of the show. “It’s a really cool show … there’s a lot of really fun songs that I specifically picked for the sound of my five-piece band. Very big band, kind of swing and even roots-jazz and roots-blues oriented that came from 1945.
“I searched and tried to find songs that were appropriate for this era too, that really just showed the heart of what a community and what a country could do and how they were feeling at the time of World War II, especially the ending. It was definitely a different time. It’s really something else to go through those songs and hear where the heart is.”
Whit Smith, guitarist of Hot Club of Cowtown, said his group will lean on much of the Western music that was popular at the time; including Wills, Spade Cooley and Tex Williams.
Smith started the band with violinist James in 1997. Zack Sapunor rounds out the group on bass. The show will offer two different perspectives on the music that was popular around the end of World War II, he said.
“We cover all the bases of popular American music of the 1940s,” he said. “Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys were huge in 1945 — not everyone realizes how big Western music was at the time. About half our set is Western and about half is more what you might imagine is swing.”
Although each band has different styles of “old” music, it works together, he said.
“They’re completely compatible and they go together like a hand and a glove,” he said.
Songs you’ll hear from Hot Club of Cowtown include “I’ll Be Seeing You, “It Had to Be You,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Oklahoma Hills,” and “Stay a Little Longer,” he said.
“This show is completely natural for our band. We already played songs that were written in the ’20s and ’30s and became very popular in the ’40s,” he said. “We play a mix of Western and what somebody might call jazz today but back then it was just popular music. The repertoire was already in our wheelhouse. Those are beautiful, classic songs.”
This show is steeped in history — they talk about the songs’ origins and the people who wrote and performed them in 1945, Lozier said.
“The finest hour is a celebration of the fact that it was the final hour of the war, it was the ending of World War II,” she said. “It was a celebratory time through all of the sacrifice and rationing and people losing loved ones. It was just the finest hour, the celebration of the end of the war.”
Smith hopes people will come out to see musicians at the tops of their games performing live music, he said.
“This music — the ’40s, the craft of playing those songs is kind of virtuosic,” he said. “It’s a really good way to hear this kind of music. You don’t hear bands like ours hardly at all. You’ve got to go out and see that stuff; they’re not going to play it on the radio for you. And the experience is different. You have that energy and the improvisation and that whole live feeling. You’ll hear things likely you’re familiar with because they are popular old songs. But you’re very likely going to hear things you weren’t familiar with … but are definitely going to like.”
Hot Club of Cowtown’s ‘The Finest Hour: Celebrating the Songs that Ended WWII’ with Davina and the Vagabonds
When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 5
Where: Elgin Community College, 1700 Spartan Drive, Elgin
Tickets: $38
Information: 847-622-0300; tickets.elgin.edu
Annie Alleman is a freelance reporter for the Courier-News.
