From Schoolhouse Rock to numerology to ZZ Top, it’s been said many times over that three is the magic number. Ask Whit Smith of Hot Club of Cowtown and he will agree, “Three is the magic number and it’s an intense number,” he adds.

The Austin based trio, celebrating 28 years of playing western swing fused with swing and gypsy jazz, features Elana James on fiddle and Jake Erwin on upright bass. The band will return to Houston for an early show at The Continental Club on Saturday, February 8.

“We don’t have drums so everybody gets to play a lot. You’re not going to step on anyone’s toes. It’s pretty hard so you do get to play a lot that’s fun,” says Smith. On stage, the trio bounces around with everyone taking turns to solo, playing together and harmonizing in a warm, timeless way that perfectly captures the essence of the sounds they celebrate as a band.

“If three people can all sing that just becomes a huge dynamic and a real addition to just the one instrument or one person singing. Three people singing is greater than the sum of its parts. On the stage it’s intense, it’s this triangle it just keeps going.”

Since meeting in New York City after Smith answered a classified ad in The Village Voice placed by James in 1994, the players have just kept going. At the time, Smith, originally from Massachusetts, was immersing himself in the world of western swing playing in an 11-piece band around town on a weekly basis and working at a record store that allowed him to delve deeper into the past.

“I was the kind of person that dove into old records and spent a lot of time in antique stores and I would go find old timers who actually played in the ‘30s,” says Smith, adding that he then “infected” the classically trained James with the western swing bug.

“She didn’t really see her trajectory in life as being a classical violinist but she loved it and then she liked fiddle tunes and western music because growing up in Kansas she would go downtown and play fiddle tunes with her friend. I introduced her to this idea that you could play this simple folk music, old western songs and old pop jazz songs but with as much virtuosity as you wanted to practice.”

Hot Club of Cowtown honors, protects and propels the music of the past breathing new life into it with their fervent approach to playing and ability to work together to unify the audience on the dancefloor.

“It was designed as dance music,” says Smith describing how he discovered Bob Wills and beyond while working in the record store in New York City. “I was looking for something new. I was a rock musician and I was learning about jazz but I wasn’t really excited by it and that’s because I hadn’t really found the jazz dance bands. What I picked up on right away was that energy because these bands, if people weren’t dancing, they were not going to get the gig.”

It was this energy that Smith tapped into for his vision of the band and holds to this day. “It absolutely has to be played on the edge of your seat. You have to be really delivering energy which might sound like a mission, but back then that’s what was exciting to that generation, that swing sound.”

Smith and James actively sought out western swing and jazz players who played and recorded in ‘30s and ‘40s, giving them a firsthand experience of the music.

“When we would go and find these players it was fun for us,” says Smith describing meeting and playing with the likes of Cliff Bruner and Buck Johnson. “They’d be 85 years old; we would go over at 11 a.m. and break out our instruments and they wouldn’t call any western songs. They all wanted to play what we call jazz now but it was pop music of the day but played with a pop jazz kind of flavor.”

These experiences as a band not only cemented the feeling that they were on the right track with their blend of western swing and jazz but also showed them that despite the age range in the room, they shared many experiences of real-life shenanigans with their predecessors.

“That made us feel good too because that’s what we were into. I can say the Hot Club of Cowtown always played music that we wanted to play. We always played what we liked, for better or worse, but your fans can rely on you, people can rely on you that you’re going to give them a certain player. We thought of selling out and we even tried every now and then but we’d always come back to that hot jazz.”

The question that comes up the most for the band is how they got the idea to blend Django Reinhardt and Bob Wills, a natural question but upon closer listening the stylistic similarities are obvious and well rooted in history.

Look no further than Texas god Willie Nelson whose guitar playing embodies these shared sensibilities. Smith describes how the band toured with Nelson and Bob Dylan during the 2004 Field of Dreams tour, leading James to then spending time in Dylan’s band on fiddle.

Smith recalls joyfully how Nelson would join the band backstage for jams before the show encouraging them to do “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” as their encore. When the band reminded him, they were the opener and openers don’t get an encore, the legend replied with a sweet, “Well tonight you do.”

“Then sure enough we were getting to the last song we were playing and there’s Willie waving at us, ‘Don’t forget your encore!’ So, we finish and out he comes and the crowd goes nuts and we do that song and that’s what he did every night of the tour; he’d just come out and close it with us. The guys a saint.”

Hot Club of Cowtown will perform on Saturday, February 8 at The Continental Club, 3700 Main, 6:30 p.m, $10-15.