The Hot Club of Cowtown

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the music seemed so alive and contemporary. At the center of the sound were, and are, the fiddle of Elana James and the guitar of Whit Smith. Their sparkling instrumental repartee seemed to have the element of competition that's been central to good jazz from the beginning.

The group released several more albums, appeared on A Prairie Home Companion and at Britain's giant Glastonbury festival, and generally got better and better. Then, as so often happens with young roots musicians who master an old style completely but don't know where to take it next, they split up. Smith and James formed their own trios, and James spent an eventful several months touring with Bob Dylan. That could easily have been the end of the Hot Club of Cowtown, but they had a level of musical imagination, and perhaps a way of taking the music personally, that brought them back together and made them try to go beyond what they had done before.

That involved stepping onto revivalist music's edge, a narrow space between music that's frozen in time and music that loses its connection with the things it's reviving. Their new album, Wishful Thinking, takes risks and makes a consistently intriguing attempt to walk that line. Pure Western swing instrumentals bump up against original songs (some with drums, the first time the group has used them) that go beyond the romantic conventions current when these styles were young. James contributes a song about a high school reunion and one inspired by Federico Fellini's film Nights of Cabiria, pushing the boundaries of what the listener might expect from the band.