Hollywood’s haven for singer-songwriters, the dimly lit and intimate Hotel Cafe, is expanding its brand from live music to recordings with the release this week of Jim Bianco’s “Sing.”
The disc, distributed by Rykodisc, hits stores just weeks after a remote edition of the venue operated during the Sundance Film Festival and just days before the third edition of the Hotel Café Tour hits the road. The 16-concert tour, which features Bianco and other Café regulars such as Ingrid Michaelson, Cary Brothers and Sara Bareilles, opens March 6 in San Diego and runs through April 12 at L.A.’s Music Box at Henry Fonda Theater.
The entourage will also perform March 9 at the Café itself and has a major showcase lined up for SXSW in Austin next week. Shows on the tours have been anything goes affairs with musicians alternating lineups, jamming together for finales and keeping the evenings wide open, much like the Hotel Café has been during its seven years of existence – and one remodeling 
“We all needed a scene, a place to go” says Bianco, who moved to L.A. from New York eight years ago and found a local club scene very set in its ways. “It was very unintentional, but great that it worked out this way.”
Bianco has been a mainstay at the Café and on the tour, appearing on all three and remaining enthused by the collaborative nature of the shows. The venue, meanwhile, has become something of a workshop for him: he has tried out theatrical ideas involving catwalks, found new musicians to work with and even written songs on the a piano tucked away in the venue’s front room.
“At least a part of every song on the album was conceived on the piano at the Hotel Café,” Bianco says, apparently surprising himself as he comes to that realization as he connects the dots between his first two discs and the new one. “The heart opens a little more on ‘Sing.’ “The last record had lots of sex. This has some loss, some love and some sex.”
Sex, or at least the libido, produces some of Bianco’s best lines. “Sing’s” “Painkiller,” for example, offers a lecherous twist: “Your skirt blew up high enough that I could see your skin/It appeared as though I was owed a favor by the wind." Love and commitment is there,too: "To hell with the devil/ I'm selling my soul to you.”
Intriguingly, Bianco is hardly a standard HC character: He’s more rambunctious and less in touch with his inner-Laurel Canyon than his peers. His songs have elements from European cabaret, South American dances, Chicago blues and wrong-side-of-the-tracks authors. And he does not possess what anyone would call a mellifluous voice.
Since everyone listening to Bianco is familiar with the raspy tone of Tom Waits, he gets that comparison. Some of that owes to the lyrical content, but his voice never even threatens to go as deep as Waits; it’s not a failed impersonation. His vocals, to my ears, are actually much closer to Fats Waller with a hint of gravel; it’s the hacking voice of a hangover, one that be tolerated. It suits the control clatter behind him just fine.
“I’ve always been a huge fan of (people) with weird voices – Tom Waits, Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday. I have yet to truly find mine but the more I do, the more comfortable with it I become.”
Bianco held his record release party Tuesday at the Hotel Café and performs today (March 5) at 7 p.m. at Amoeba Records in Hollywood.