17 Hippies with Davina and the Vagabonds

From Krautrock to Punk, and Jazz to Classical Music … you can tell, the 17 Hippies have been around! The 17 Hippies started off playing “unplugged” - meaning unplugged - with their line-up changing from three to twenty or so musicians. A few years later they “condensed” into the current line-up, and for the past six years or more, they’ve been playing with the same thirteen people (with the exception of Danda, their new bass player) Their groove foundation is bass, banjo, guitar and ukulele (and sometimes accordion and tenor horn), and then they add cello, violins, clarinets, trumpet, and trombone … and no percussion! Right from the start the band mixed the music they heard on the streets of Berlin: traditional music from Eastern Europe, France and Western pop music to create their own “Berlin Style”. As they went along, they started to write stuff too … with lyrics in German, English, and French.

On top of playing more than 1.500 gigs around the world, the 17 Hippies have written the score for a couple of movies (including the prize winning film HALBE TREPPE - Grill Point - by acclaimed German director Andreas Dresen, music for theatre; they’ve performed as a circus band, have joined up with other musicians to perform and record albums (with Les Hurlements d’Léo from Bordeaux to form HARDCORE TROBADORS), or with Marc Ribot for our “17 Hippies play Guitar” album. EL DORADO is their third studio album from altogether nine German 17 Hippies CDs in total. This new album demonstrates perfectly how a band matures over time.  Whether influenced by Balkan music, American rock, British pop or even film music – nevertheless, their own compositions and sophisticated arrangements enter a new realm, where the sum of what they do is more than the explicable components. Always lead by energy and razor-sharp interplay, it still – as they say – “boils down to plain dance music!” Regardless of age or nationality, everybody around the world seems to get it, as proven by the international success of this “Rock-the-world-Orchestra”.

Davina of opening act Davina and the Vagabonds was described by the Star Tribune's Chris Reimenschneider as ""Hardest -working Blues woman in Minnesota, but......two things remain  consistent at all her shows, though: her throaty but cushiony voice, which has a sort of hard-mattress comfort to it that's part Bonnie  Raitt, Etta James and a little Amy Winehouse, and her band's  rollicking New Orleans flavor, driven home by dueling horn players and a bayou-thick standup bass”

Tickets are on sale now from the Cedar Ticketline (612-338-2674 ext 2), Cedar outlets, and online at Ticketweb.