David Hamburger

Multi-instrumentalist David Hamburger began playing guitar at age 12 while growing up outside Boston. His initial instructor introduced him to bluegrass, even as his father acquainted him with Tin Pan Alley pop at home. During his teenage years he developed a growing fascination with blues and jazz, folding those influences into his own approach. At Wesleyan University a friend’s slide-guitar lessons deepened his engagement with the blues. He later enrolled in Manhattan’s School of Music to study jazz composition, yet soon departed the graduate program in order to join the then-unknown Freedy Johnston. At the same time Hamburger performed both with an R&B band and as a solo artist. Eventually he assembled several favored local players to record King of the Brooklyn Delta, which appeared in 1995. Continued road work strengthened his audience across New York and New England while he kept adding guitar, dobro, and pedal steel to other artists’ sessions. In 1999 he released Indigo Rose, an album captured in little more than a week.