Our Mission Emerges
Putting spokane in the hot club of spokane
In the years following the Think Swing Jazz Festival, Hot Club of Spokane experimented with both musical genre and mission identity. We started in 2007 as a more or less traditional jazz manouche ensemble, but by 2008, we added more horns, and by 2010, a drummer. These instruments are a departure from the original Hot Club of France, which was all strings (3 guitars, fiddle, and bass). Our repertoire moved away from tunes written by Django Reinhardt, as well, especially as we wrestled with the idea of a Hot Club of Spokane - what is so Spokane about what we do? Shouldn't we be more than a mirror of the original Hot Club? Shouldn't there be something significantly Spokane about our music and identity?
Around 2012, while working as the publisher/editor of Nostalgia Magazine (a local history publication), our bandleader, Garrin Hertel, started exploring the music and history of Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, and Al Rinker - all of whom called Spokane home in their youth. About that same time, Hot Club of Spokane performed a traditional jazz manouche concert for KPBX, the local NPR affiliate, featuring a larger than life slideshow on the back wall of the Bing Crosby theater of images of Django Reinhardt.
And then it hit us: We should create a live music, documentary film experience that tells the story of Bing Crosby, Al Rinker, and Mildred Bailey, their beginnings in Spokane, and then perform selections from their repertoires live on stage. This is one way we can live up to the original mission of the Hot Club of France, but with a true connection to what it means to do that here in Spokane.
As part of that effort, we put together a Kickstarter campaign for a new album, and the video below demonstrated the need for such an album. We asked Spokane residents to name a Bing Crosby tune that wasn't a Christmas song, and the results were fairly predictable in spite of the fact that you could name just about any standard in the American Songbook, and Bing has recorded it.
On May 2, 2015, the day before Bing Crosby's birthday, Hot Club of Spokane staged “Now You Has Jazz” at the Bing Crosby Theater for approximately 600 guests. This event, and the production, has shaped our mission ever since to be a truly Spokane version of the Hot Club of France, combining local music and local history in various ways for audiences throughout the region.
The KPBX Kids Concert that helped us test the idea of multimedia concerts, featuring a 4pc traditional jazz manouche version of the Hot Club of Spokane, with Steve Bauer, Andrew Wilson, Kim Plewniak, and Garrin Hertel at the Bing Crosby Theater.
Promo video for a recent performance of “Now You Has Jazz” at Hamilton Studio, March 2025, this time by the Zonky Jazz Band.
A sample section of “Now You Has Jazz”, from the original performance of it on May 2, 2015 at the Bing Crosby Theater, featuring the Mildred Bailey song, “Doin' the Uptown Lowdown”.