Andy Scott and his Western Swing Orchestra play the Phillip Island Bowling Club on Sunday January 19, from 2pm

Presented by the Phillip Island Jazz Club, Andy has assembled an absolutely top group of musos for the performance.

The band features Matt K West on guitar and vocals, Steve Grant on accordion, Esther Henderson on fiddle (in much demand internationally), Lachlan Wallace on drums. Steve Temple on trumpet, Ben Franz on pedal steel guitar and Andy Scott on bass and vocals.

"There will be a CD launch on the day for the Andy Scott Collective and we can vouch that the music is great," said a club spokesperson.

Western Swing

Western swing is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which attracted huge crowds to dance halls and clubs in Texas, Oklahoma and California during the 1930s and 1940s, until a federal war-time nightclub tax in 1944 contributed to the genre's decline.

The movement was an outgrowth of jazz. The music is an amalgamation of rural, cowboy, polka, old-time, Dixieland jazz, and blues blended with swing; and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar.

The electrically amplified stringed instruments, especially the steel guitar, give the music a distinctive sound. Later incarnations have also included overtones of bebop.

Western swing differs in several ways from the music played by the nationally popular horn-driven big swing bands of the same era. In Western bands, even fully orchestrated bands, vocals, and other instruments followed the fiddle's lead, though like popular horn-led bands that arranged and scored their music, most Western bands improvised freely, either by soloists or collectively.

According to country singer Merle Travis, "Western swing is nothing more than a group of talented country boys, unschooled in music, but playing the music they feel, beating a solid two-four rhythm to the harmonies that buzz around their brains. When it escapes in all its musical glory, my friend, you have Western swing."

Tickets are in demand, so anyone interested is urged to book early.

Entry is $20 for Jazz Club members and $25 for visitors.

Phillip Island Bowling Club is at 40 Dunsmore Road in Cowes and the performance is from 2pm until 4.30pm.

For more information or to book tickets, please ring Jill on 0417 416 300 or Geoff on 0409 948 613.