“Hot Club Swing” is a David Grisman composition. Its title refers to the Quintette du Hot Club de France, the all-string group Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli founded in Paris in 1934, with lead parts on guitar and violin, a double bass, extra guitarists for rhythm and no drummer. Grisman’s own music, which he called Dawg music, grew from bluegrass and from jazz influenced by Reinhardt and Grappelli.
The first release was on Dawg ’90, the first album on Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label (ACD 1, 1990), recorded at Dawg Studios in Mill Valley, California, in December 1989. On the track Grisman plays mandolin, with John Carlini on guitar, Matt Glaser on fiddle, Joe Craven on mandola and percussion and Jim Kerwin on bass. It is the ninth of the album’s ten tracks.
The piece goes back further. Grisman’s Dawg Works series collects recordings of his compositions in the order he wrote them, and the second volume, covering 1976 to 1981 and issued in 2022, lists it as “Gypsy Swing (Hot Club Swing).” The recording used there pairs Grisman with Stéphane Grappelli, Andy Statman on mandolin, Tony Rice, Diz Disley and John Carlini on guitars and Ray Brown on bass; it had not been released before the 2012 compilation Hi-Def Dawg. A track credited to the David Grisman Quintet appears on the 2005 Acoustic Disc download sampler Acoustic Swing, and in 2021 the piece was one of the twenty in Dawg Jazz, a volume of his Book of the Dawg series.
