| SoundStage! Music Online Editor's Pick
Archives September/October 2002 The Hot Club of Cowtown - Ghost Train Musical Performance  One of the best things about reviewing music
is crossing paths with a group you knew nothing about but whose music you grow to love.
The Hot Club of Cowtown is such a group for me, their mixture of Western swing and jazz
being a just-right musical amalgam and not merely an academic exercise in genre blending.
The trio's fourth release for HighTone, Ghost Train, keeps the high-energy and
highly creative backbone of previous releases intact, but it includes more original
material and even some infectious vocal overdubbing on "Forget-Me-Nots." The Hot
Club of Cowtown's playing -- Whit Smith on guitar, Elana Fremerman on fiddle, and Jake
Erwin on bass -- is exquisite and lively, and the sound of this disc, as with the group's
other HighTone albums, is spacious and detailed. I don't know of any group exactly like
the Hot Club of Cowtown -- their music sounds both familiar and new. Check 'em out....Marc
Mickelson
Pete Townshend - Another Scoop Pete Townshend - Scoop 3 Musical Performance  The second and third albums respectively in
Pete Townshend's series of audio notebooks, Another Scoop and Scoop 3 offer
home recordings, demos, and unreleased tracks from one of the few rock stars whose output
could support even one such project. While Townshend fans will swoon at the improved
sonics of these two 24/96 DVD releases, I'm left wondering if such audiophile remasters
will find their way into the collections of more casual listeners. They should. I'm a big
fan of the original Scoop, which Classic Records has plans to re-release soon, so
these two releases are right up my alley. Townshend can noodle in more interesting ways
than just about any musician, and the alternative versions of well-known Who tunes are
always interesting. As you might expect, sonics vary from cut to cut, ranging from OK to
very good with more current m aterial. However,
the sense that these are definitive digital versions (Classic Records has released both on
180-gram vinyl too) never wavers, as the sound is absolutely clear, like it or not. If you
are looking for music that's more off the cuff than over produced or you're even a casual
Townshend or Who fan, you'll find these DVDs literally packed with goodies....Marc
Mickelson
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