SANTA CRUZ -- Guitarist
and ethnomusicologist Bob Brozman, one of the most internationally
prominent musicians to come out of Santa Cruz County, died Wednesday at
his home in Ben Lomond. He was 59. The cause of death is pending.
Brozman had built a career as a guitarist and ethnomusicologist, moving
from an early fascination with the delta blues of the American south to a
consuming passion for the traditional music of Hawaii. He was also one
of the world's leading authorities on the National steel guitar.
The early years
Brozman emerged in Santa Cruz in the 1970s as a street musician, playing
a decidedly un-contemporary American roots style of music. Known for
playing anything from obscure jazz tunes to Hawaiian chanties,
Bob Brozman at home in July, 1992. (Dan Coyro/Sentinel file) (Dan Coyro)
often
dressed in a white suit, Brozman was one of Santa Cruz's most familiar
faces in clubs before launching a recording career that took him around
the world.
In recent years, Brozman has traveled extensively, performing in Europe,
Asia, the Americas and the South Pacific. He often said that his work
as a musician was a form of anthropology. His love for early jazz, blues
and Hawaiian, as well as Caribbean, Okinawan and Afro-Latin forms, may
have been seen as a form of electicism, but, he said, each musical
tradition was linked. "I play music that is the accidental result of
Colonial exploitation."
Brozman discovered the National steel guitar at the age of 13, and it was, he said, a turning point in his life.
"At the very beginning,"
said
his long-time friend, collaborator and producer Daniel Thomas, "Bob was
fascinated with the bottle-neck. He told once that to find a style, you
have to find all the things you don't like. He didn't like things
plugged in. So that led him to the acoustic guitar. But he didn't think
it was loud enough, so that led him to the lap steel, then the
bottle-neck."
From there, he developed an obsession with 78-rpm recordings of early
American music, which led him to his first exposure to Hawaiian and
Calypso. He studied ethnomusicology at Washington University in St.
Louis, and, while in college, he would often travel throughout the South
to play with and learn from jazz and blues musicians from the 1920s and
1930s.
Mixed with culture
Anthropological understanding was always a feature of Brozman's music.
While he was popular in Europe early in his career for his rakish image,
often interpreted by the media as part Leon Redbone, part Frank Zappa,
he never pursued wide commercial success in the U.S. He was intent in
documenting and eventually actively participating in all the ways the
guitar interacted with local cultural traditions.
"He was always interested," said Thomas, "in what happens when a guitar
is left behind in some culture or on some island with no instructions on
how to use it, and how it adapts to what that culture feels is
consonant. He told me, 'I just feel like I'm here to follow the guitar
to all the places it finds a home."
Brozman was one of American music's greatest collaborators, having
recorded albums with a number of musicians in a dizzying number of
cultures, including Indian master Debashish Bhattacharya, American
mandolin master David Grisman and even local string bands from Papua New
Guinea in a release designed to benefit local music in that nation.
Tour memories
Thomas remembered a Canadian tour in which Brozman led a huge
collaboration between musicians from India, South America, Europe and
Japan. "We had 16 musicians who had mostly never met," he said. "We had a
Greek speaker with no translator, a Japanese musician with no
translator, and others from India, South America, all over the place. We
had one day to rehearse, and without exception every one of these
virtuosos musicians were terror-struck, except for Bob. He just said,
'Don't worry, I'm the hub here, plug your spokes in and here's what
we're going to do.' The very next day we were in front of 20,000 people
at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, with a 16-man band, and one day of
rehearsal. I don't know any other musicians who had cajones like that."
The secret to his collaborative success, he told the Sentinel in 2000,
was a deeply thought-out approach that involved educating himself about a
given culture, understanding music's place in that culture, figuring
out the body language of how musicians communicate comfort or discomfort
and anthropological cues -- "observing pupil diameter, facial movement,
respiration and fine muscle movement so that I'm as empathetic as
possible toward how a person approaches their music and their
instrument."
Brozman was severely injured in a car accident in 1980, and carried pain
with him the rest of his life. Still, he kept up a prodigious traveling
schedule that brought him to almost every corner of the globe. He had
been popular in Germany, France and the U.K. for years, and had
cultivated sold-out audiences in Spain, Italy and Australia. He played
widely in Japan, and was known to perform in unusual places such as
Singapore.
News travels fast
Daniel Thomas, who has been Brozman's closest musical ally for the past
20 years, said he spent much of the day on Thursday calling people all
over the world with the news of Brozman's passing. Soon, his e-mail
folders began filling up.
"It's astonishing to me," said Thomas, "how many people I don't know who
know Bob's work and who managed to find me online to express their
grief. I've received about a thousand messages in the past six hours,
from people I don't even know who have the albums and getting the albums
out and thinking, Who can I say this to? Who can I tell how important
he was to me, even though I never knew him."
Contact Wallace Baine at wbaine@santacruzsentinel.com.
Bob Brozman
Born: March 8, 1954, New York City
Died: April 24, 2013, Ben Lomond
Survivors: Wife, Haley S. Robertson. Daughter, Zoe Brozman
Education: Washington University, St. Louis
Career: First emerged as a street and club musician in Santa Cruz before
becoming a recording artist and world-touring musician. Released his
first solo album in 1981, 'Blue Hula Stomp,' and has released about 30
albums since, including many collaborations with musicians from all over
the world. Authored the definitive work on National steel guitars 'The
History and Artistry of National Resonator Instruments.'
Services: Pending.
By WALLACE BAINE
Santa Cruz Sentinel
If you support live Blues acts, up and coming Blues talents and want to learn more about Blues news and Fathers of the Blues, -
”LIKE” ---Bman’s Blues Report--- Facebook Page! I’m looking for great talent and trying to grow the audience for your favorite band!
Everett Barksdale (April 28, 1910, Detroit, Michigan - January 29, 1986, Inglewood, California) was an American jazz guitarist and session musician, Harold Vick's most used guitarist.
Barksdale played bass and banjo before settling on guitar, and moved to Chicago early in the 1930s. His first major engagement there was in Erskine Tate's band, which he followed with a stint behind Eddie South. Toward the end of the decade he began collaborating with Benny Carter. In the early part of the next decade, Barksdale moved to New York City, where he found work in studios and on radio for CBS.
Barksdale's credits as a session player in the 1940s and 1950s are extensive. He played with vocal ensembles such as The Blenders and The Clovers, and accompanied vocalists like Dean Barlow and Maxine Sullivan. Much of this work was due to his association with producer Joe Davis. He began working with Art Tatum late in the 1940s, taking Tiny Grimes's spot in his trio alongside bassist Slam Stewart. The association with Tatum would continue until 1956, when Barksdale became musical director of The Ink Spots. The following year, he played on Mickey & Sylvia's hit "Love Is Strange". He played for many years in the house band of ABC, and played on recordings by Lena Horne, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dinah Washington, and Sarah Vaughan. Among his other jazz associations are Milt Hinton, Buddy Tate, Clark Terry, and Louis Armstrong in his later years.
Barksdale retired from active performance in the 1970s and moved to California. He died there in 1986.
