Hear where they came from

WITH its intimacy, feel-good vibe and nouveau hip location, the Hotel Cafe has emerged as a locus for the newly energized singer-songwriter scene in Los Angeles since it opened in Hollywood almost five years ago.

So devotees of the Cahuenga Boulevard venue -- who buzzed about its tightknit fraternity of performers, celebrity drop-ins and atmosphere reminiscent of L.A.’s ‘70s heyday as a songwriter incubator -- were understandably concerned when the Hotel Cafe got bigger.

First, owners Maximillian Mamikunian and Marko Shafer tore down a wall earlier this year and doubled the room’s size. Then they took the “room” on the road, launching a Hotel Cafe Tour that featured a rotating cast of the venue’s regulars. The tour hits town Wednesday, but not at the Hotel Cafe -- the concert will be at El Rey Theatre.

The growth is apparently coming without pains.

If the word of mouth on the Hotel Cafe’s remodel is generally positive, the performers who will take the El Rey’s stage -- Butch Walker, Jim Bianco, Imogen Heap, Cary Brothers and Joe Purdy, among others -- marvel at how they’ve been able to project their camaraderie to larger spaces.

“It’s the best time I’ve ever had on the road in my life,” says Brothers, a recent favorite among troubadour types thanks to a song on last year’s soundtrack to “Garden State.” “If we can’t replicate what it feels like to walk into the Hotel Cafe on a Friday night, then we haven’t done our job with this tour.”

Walker -- a down-and-dirty rocker whose work as a producer has included collaboration with mainstream artists such as Avril Lavigne and Simple Plan -- agrees. “There’s no egos, and there’s no concerns,” he says. “This [makes it] a lot more fun -- and a lot more interesting.”

Bianco, whose throwback songs made him one of the first notable headline performers at the cozy Hollywood hangout, sums it up: “Putting the two words together, Hotel Cafe, what it means is more than anyone could have expected. [It means] friends, hanging out, playing music together -- sincerely, authentically.”

What it also means is that this is not your standard opening band/breakdown/headliner tour. This is a tour built around a name, and one with a unique spirit. There are no individual sets. Instead, the night’s performers do a round-robin, playing three songs each before reconvening to play a giant set of music with the house band that’s on the road for them. The performers stand on the side of the stage, ready -- at a moment’s notice -- to play songs with one another that they may have learned only hours before.

“I wrote a song the other day in the morning,” says Walker. “You can take a new song, say ‘check this out,’ play it in sound check. We played it that night.”

The idea for the tour actually came about in an unusual place: Park City, Utah. At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, a group of Hotel Cafe regulars played an extremely well-received show -- an experience that was repeated at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

“The next step was really obvious,” says Shafer, the club’s all-in-one booker, manager and owner. “Let’s take this on the road.”

WITH some help from the social networking website Myspace.com, which many of the artists were already active on, the tour idea became a reality. Myspace put together a disc of all of the artists on the tour to distribute at the shows, a kind of Hotel Cafe primer that Shafer sees as a way for fans to discover other Hotel Cafe-friendly artists whom they may not know.

All of the artists on the bill already see this happening: Heap, a lovely techno chanteuse, isn’t a natural fit on a bill with hard-rocker Walker, but their mutual, obvious love for making music (and onstage, spontaneous collaboration) has, according to the acts, garnered them new fans.

“People who know about the tour are real music lovers,” says Heap. “Since we’re all different, it kind of adds to the vibe of the tour.”

Brothers is already mentioning the possibility of adding a European leg to the tour, and Shafer mentions that someday there could be Hotel Cafes in other cities. But, he quickly adds, that doesn’t mean that they’ll outgrow their roots.

“It’s still going to be what the Hotel Cafe represents, which is community -- good vibe, good friends. I think it’s not a bad idea, because it’s taking a whole vibe to a bigger level.”

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Jeff Miller can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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Hotel Cafe Tour

Who: Butch Walker, Cary Brothers, Imogen Heap, Gary Jules, Jim Bianco and others

Where: El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday

Price: $21

Price: (323) 936-4790 or www.theelrey.com