Jim Bianco - Biography
Jim Bianco is a charismatic singer/songwriter and multiple instrumentalist based out of Southern California, perhaps best known for his popular clique residencies at the revered Hotel Café in Los Angeles. As an independent acoustic artist, Bianco’s captivating, sexually-charged solo performances—as well as his collaborations with other Hotel Café artists and with his full band—have made him one of the kingpins of the singer/songwriter renaissance of the early-2000s. Since moving to Los Angeles, Bianco has released six studio albums and one live CD based on a show at the Hotel Café. With a demanding schedule performing 150-200 times a year, he has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Japan, while opening for other luminaries such as Gary Jules and Shelby Lynne and playing such festivals as SXSW. Bianco has also produced a series of short films, often marked for their levity and video diary feel. In 2010 the Ventura Film Society featured Bianco’s films for a benefit.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1976, Bianco grew up mostly in Long Island and learned to play piano at a young age. With a music vocation and an inspirational well of Miles Davis, Tom Waits and Loudon Wainwright, Bianco moved to Boston to attend college at Berklee College of Music, where he studied jazz piano and earned a degree in music education. After traipsing around Europe he relocated to Los Angeles in 2000, and while there was one of the early gravitators to the newly opened Hotel Café space, a coffeehouse that hosted an open mic songwriter night. Using a simple principle—“that the most important instrument that you can use is your heart”—Bianco’s early performances spurred one of the Hotel Café’s biggest perpetuators, Gary Jules, to invite the newly moved transplant into an opening slot. Thus began the singer/songwriter renaissance that not only put the Hotel Café on the map, but catapulted many buskers and songwriters into an until-then nonexistent spotlight. Along with Jules, owners Marko Schafer and Max Mamikunian—as well as KCRW director, Nic Harcourt, who championed the artists on his radio show—the space quickly became a hotspot on par with Largo for its constant talent, great sound and edgy purposefulness. It also gave the Bianco fuel to write and perform new material, often hashed out on the piano in the back room of the venue.
Bianco’s live sets are often interactive affairs, with him walking around with the microphone encouraging people to sing-along on his song “Sing” or filling the air with intimate, gravid insinuation. He has been known to add burlesque elements to his sets. In 2002 he recorded his first album—the self-released and self-produced Well Within Reason—at fellow songwriter Michael Starr’s studio. The following year he collaborated with Australian Tim Davies, and the result was the now out of print (but available online) Jim Bianco and the Tim Davies Big Band. The record featured Bianco’s vocals over a 19-piece big band. In the liner notes of the album Bianco thanked Thelonius Monk and Billie Holiday, two of his idols.
Bianco started gaining a wider reputation with the release of his 2004 album Handsome Devil, which he called his “sex record, because there’s a sexual theme throughout the whole thing,” and that the album served as a comment on the “tenacity of the male libido.” Just like previous material, the album was chock full of cameos (Gary Jules, Petra Haden, et al) and independently released, yet a couple of the tracks made it past the local stage and onto television screens. Notably, the saloon waltz “So Far, So Good” was used on an episode of HBO’s Real Sex, and later A&E used several tracks on its Random 1.
He had a Japanese release called Steady (2006) which coincided with his gigging dates over there, and in 2008 put out his first album on the newly introduced Hotel Café label, Sing. Again using Brad Gordon’s numerous instrumental contributions—as well as sampling Gershwin on “If Your Mama Knew”—the album was recorded at Magic Carpet Studios and spawned the gospel-sounding title-track, which became a favorite of the live set with Bianco breaking down the fourth wall and inviting audience members to belt along. The track “To Hell With the Devil” was featured on an episode of CBS’s Moonlight television show.
In 2009 Bianco independently released a 20-song compilation called Once Again, with FEELING!, which was split between popular tracks from previous albums and nine never-before released demos and b-sides. In 2011 he released Loudmouth, and his next release, Cookie Cutter, will arrive sometime in 2013.
