Mack Avenue Records has announced the July 15 sophomore release of Night Town, by Hot Club of Detroit.  Inspired by the innovated sounds of gypsy jazz, the current Hot Club of Detroit is made of guitarist Evan Perri, accordionist Julien Labro, soprano and tenor saxophonist Carl Cafagna, rhythm guitarist Paul Brady and bassist Shannon Wade.

The fibrous accordion tones of Labro, a native of Marseilles, France, links the Detroit quintet to the French musette style from which gypsy jazz partially sprung, while Cafagna’s robust saxophone work introduces bop and post-bop elements to gypsy jazz. “We kinda use the gypsy jazz thing as a springboard for all these wonderful ideas we have in our heads that we’ve grown up with here in Detroit,” Perri explains. “In the future, I’d even like to incorporate some Motown stuff into this type of music.”

Night Town is the follow-up to the group’s widely acclaimed 2006 debut CD, Hot Club of Detroit. The album finds Perri and company giving a New Orleans boogaloo twist to “Django’s Monkey,” a number inspired by the Reinhardt composition “Django’s Tiger,” which utilized “Tiger Rag” chord changes. The disc also includes the Detroit combo’s distinctive takes on the Reinhardt tunes “Speevy” and “Melodie au Crepuscule” the venerable French songs “J’Attendrai” and “Valse a Rosenthal,” plus the Evan Perri compositions “Night Town, ” “Swing 05” and “Two Weeks” (co-written with Julien Labro).

Perri, who now plays a small oval-hole Del Arte acoustic guitar, formed the Hot Club of Detroit in 2003 while attending Wayne State University in Detroit. The group took first place in the 2004 Detroit International Jazz Festival competition and won the 2006 Detroit Music Awards as Outstanding Traditional Jazz Group. In 2007, the band swept the Detroit Music Awards, winning in the Outstanding Traditional Jazz Artist, Best Independent Label Recording, Outstanding National Small Independent Label Recording, and Outstanding Video on a Limited Budget categories Perri himself was named Best Jazz Instrumentalist. And, for the past five years, the quintet has hosted the annual Djangofest Detroit at various venues, including the Masonic Temple, where Reinhardt himself had appeared with Duke Ellington in 1946.