Biography
Born on March 8, 1954, in New York, multi-instrumentalist Bob Brozman also worked as a historian and educator. His uncle Barney Josephson owned the Greenwich Village nightclub Cafe Society, among the earliest venues anywhere to feature Black and white musicians sharing the same stage.
While pursuing studies in music and ethnomusicology at Washington University in St. Louis, Brozman developed mastery of 1920s and 1930s classic blues along with solid command of early jazz and ragtime. During the mid-1970s, still a student, he traveled repeatedly through the South to locate, interview, and perform alongside the veteran blues players he revered.
On the Kicking Mule and Rounder labels he issued several strong albums throughout the early and middle 1980s that remain prized by scholars of vintage blues and collectors of period guitars. His 1985 Rounder release Hello Central...Give Me Dr. Jazz was followed in 1988 by Devil's Slide and then by the 1992 Rounder album Truckload of Blues.
He further partnered on recording projects with international artists such as the Tau Moe Family on Remembering the Songs of Our Youth, Debashish Bhattacharya on Mahima, René Lacaille on DigDig, Takashi Hirayasu on Jin Jin and Nankuru Naisa, Djeli Moussa Diawara on Ocean Blues, Led Kaapana on In the Saddle, David Grisman on Tone Poems III, Jeff Lang on Rolling Through This World, Woody Mann on Get Together, and Cyril Pahinui on Four Hands Sweet & Hot. As a solo performer he stayed active, issuing Live Now, Metric Time, and Blues Reflex in the first years of the new century.
Trips to Papua New Guinea in 2003 and 2004 yielded field recordings and footage with local string bands; the resulting CD/DVD package Songs of the Volcano appeared in 2005. Demonstrating continued range across culturally diverse material, Brozman delivered the 2007 albums Lumiere and Post-Industrial Blues. He died at his Santa Cruz, California, residence on April 23, 2013, at age 59.
While pursuing studies in music and ethnomusicology at Washington University in St. Louis, Brozman developed mastery of 1920s and 1930s classic blues along with solid command of early jazz and ragtime. During the mid-1970s, still a student, he traveled repeatedly through the South to locate, interview, and perform alongside the veteran blues players he revered.
On the Kicking Mule and Rounder labels he issued several strong albums throughout the early and middle 1980s that remain prized by scholars of vintage blues and collectors of period guitars. His 1985 Rounder release Hello Central...Give Me Dr. Jazz was followed in 1988 by Devil's Slide and then by the 1992 Rounder album Truckload of Blues.
He further partnered on recording projects with international artists such as the Tau Moe Family on Remembering the Songs of Our Youth, Debashish Bhattacharya on Mahima, René Lacaille on DigDig, Takashi Hirayasu on Jin Jin and Nankuru Naisa, Djeli Moussa Diawara on Ocean Blues, Led Kaapana on In the Saddle, David Grisman on Tone Poems III, Jeff Lang on Rolling Through This World, Woody Mann on Get Together, and Cyril Pahinui on Four Hands Sweet & Hot. As a solo performer he stayed active, issuing Live Now, Metric Time, and Blues Reflex in the first years of the new century.
Trips to Papua New Guinea in 2003 and 2004 yielded field recordings and footage with local string bands; the resulting CD/DVD package Songs of the Volcano appeared in 2005. Demonstrating continued range across culturally diverse material, Brozman delivered the 2007 albums Lumiere and Post-Industrial Blues. He died at his Santa Cruz, California, residence on April 23, 2013, at age 59.
Albums
