Bob Brozman

All Music Guide:

Multi-instrumentalist, historian, and educator Bob Brozman was born in New York on March 8, 1954. His uncle, Barney Josephson, was a prominent club owner who ran Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, one of the first places in New York, or anywhere, where black and white musicians played on-stage together.

Brozman studied music and ethnomusicology at Washington University in St. Louis. Brozman became not only a master of classic blues from the '20s and '30s, but also a competent performer of early jazz and ragtime. In the mid-'70s while still in college, he would make trips down South to find, interview, and play with the older blues artists from the 1920s and '30s whom he admired.

Brozman recorded several fine albums in the early and mid-'80s for the Kicking Mule and Rounder labels, and for students of early, vintage blues and vintage guitar aficionados, they're well worth looking for. In 1985, he recorded Hello Central...Give Me Dr. Jazz for the Massachusetts-based Rounder label and followed up in 1988 with Devil's Slide. Truckload of Blues appeared on Rounder in 1992.

Brozman has also collaborated on album projects with a number of musicians from around the world, including the Tau Moe Family (Remembering the Songs of Our Youth), Debashish Bhattacharya (Mahima ), René Lacaille (DigDig), Takashi Hirayasu (Jin Jin and Nankuru Naisa), Djeli Moussa Diawara (Ocean Blues), Led Kaapana (In the Saddle), David Grisman (Tone Poems III), Jeff Lang (Rolling Through This World), Woody Mann ( Get Together), and Cyril Pahinui (Four Hands Sweet & Hot). He has kept busy as a solo act as well, releasing Live Now, Metric Time, and Blues Reflex early in the new millennium.

Brozman traveled to Papua New Guinea in 2003 and 2004 to record and be filmed with local string bands, and the resulting CD/DVD set, Songs of the Volcano, appeared in 2005. Continuing to show off his versatility in performing compositions influenced by varying cultures, he released two albums in 2007, Lumiere and Post-Industrial Blues.

Wikipedia:

Bob Brozman (born March 8, 1954, New York, United States) is an American guitarist and ethnomusicologist.

He has performed in a number of styles such as Gypsy jazz, calypso, Blues, ragtime, Hawaiian and Caribbean music. Brozman has also collaborated with musicians from diverse cultural backgrounds such as India, Africa, Japan, Papua New Guinea and Reunion Island. He has been called "an instrumental wizard" and "a walking archive of 20th Century American music." Brozman maintains a steady schedule throughout the year, touring constantly throughout North America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. He has recorded numerous albums and has won the Guitar Player Readers' Poll three times in the best blues, best world and best slide guitarist categories. In 1999, Brozman and Woody Mann founded International Guitar Seminars, which hosts over 120 students annually at sites in California, New York, and Canada. From 2000 to 2005 his collaborations have landed in the European Top 10 for World Music five times.

He was formerly an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Contemporary Music Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Brozman is well known for his use of National resonator instruments from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as National Resophonic resonator instruments. He also uses Weissenborn style hollow neck acoustic steel guitars. Among his National instruments is a baritone version of the tricone guitar, which was designed in conjunction with him in the mid to late 1990s. This instrument is now part of National's actual range of products.