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2–5: Cowboy Jazz
Sounds like: A tumbleweed rolling through a downtown jazz club.
Guitarist Ryan Meagher and saxophonist Bryan Smith know how goofy their band’s name sounds. That’s half the reason they chose it.
“By itself, Cowboy Jazz has a lot of playfulness to it,” Smith says, sitting outside The 1905 after the quartet’s recent performance, “and it can be seen as, the music is going to be cheap.”
“Two words that don’t really fit together,” Meagher interjects.
“But the goal,” Smith continues, “is to give it a silly name, but then bring the audience on an experience where they’re going to learn something and have an adventure with.”
The name is something of a feint, too. Yes, the quartet—rounded out by bassist Shao Way Wu and drummer Jonas Oglesbee—does play jazz interpretations of country tunes, and they do occasionally perform with acclaimed cowboy poet Tom Swearingen, but they’re far more interested in exploring and exploding various folk music traditions.
Their most recent album, Folkways, finds the group giving the early 20th century song “Shortnin’ Bread” a playful New Orleans stomp, putting a touch of swing into the Irish tune “Miss Monaghan’s Reel,” and breathing some modernist air into the Sacred Harp hymn “Tribulation.”
“Being a white Portlander playing jazz music, I’ve always felt like, how does my identity fit with this?” Smith says. “I was looking for my voice within it. When I started to explore outside the world of jazz, I was like, OK, this might be a good way for me to explore that. This might be the answer.”
The project began during the pandemic. All four players had gotten to know each other through regular jam sessions they had been attending and, when the world shut down, decided to be in a creative bubble together. At the time, Smith was teaching himself guitar and learning country and folk standards as part of his self-education. As he started writing original material based on those tunes, he would bring them to the group’s regular jams.
“You were screwing around with these guitar techniques like Travis picking,” Meagher says to Smith, referring to a fingerpicking playing style popularized by county legend Merle Travis. “It was challenging me because I was like, oh, this is like beginner stuff that I never do. And I have to figure out your tunes? One day, I was like, are we gonna do another cowboy jazz rehearsal or whatever the heck this is? I was kind of pejoratively calling it ‘cowboy jazz’ and it stuck.”
The sound of the group continued to develop as Cowboy Jazz was able to perform live. They leaned into their whimsical spirit as they played around with “I’m an Old Cowhand,” a Johnny Mercer song already given a jazz reading in 1957 by saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and even, as they did at their first set at The 1905 last month, closing out performances with “Happy Trails.”
But their embrace of their namesake concept comes into true form on their original compositions. Their self-titled 2023 EP features loping shuffle rhythms and plaintive acoustic guitar lines slipping comfortably into the saddle with spiraling sax runs and Wu’s searching bass work.
“It has never felt cheap the way we play the music,” Meagher insists. “I mean, I’m wearing a cowboy hat and a silly buckaroo shirt, but we’re not trying to be a caricature of anything musically.”