Musical Profile
Bob Brozman: Blues Master with a Real PhD in Blues
Bob and his truckload of vintage guitars. The guitars are worth 20 times the blue book value of the truck.
I first heard Bob Brozman play guitar in at Duff's a popular eating and drinking establishment in the Central West End of St. Louis in the mid-Seventies. At the time I was just out of high school, and attempting to eke out a living playing blues guitar in the old fashioned style of 1930s players like Blind Willie McTell, Furry Lewis and Rev. Gary Davis. I had a weekly Saturday night gig at a St. Louis bar, Cafe Louis, in the warehouse district on Laclede's Landing. It was all very romantic to me... I was just out of high school and playing the blues in a smoke filled juke joint at the edge of the Mississippi River like so many of my old blues heroes once did.
One night I sauntered in to Duff's and just by happenstance heard Bob Brozman playing guitar in the middle of one of his sets. I had never heard of or had seen him before that night, but by the end of Bob's set at Duff's, I was making a major life decision because of him.
Hearing Bob play changed my life because after hearing him play guitar, I decided to give up my aspirations as a guitarist. The jig was up and I realized if I played guitar the next five decades of my life, I'd never play 1/10th as well as Bob. It was a sound decision on my part because in hindsight, I lacked the disipline, dedication and talent to ever play guitar as well as Bob. So that entirely random encounter at Duff's rescued me from spending the next five years on an ill conceived trek to a career dead-end.
Shortly after that night, I quit my weekly gig at Cafe Louis but I had one final gig commitment that I had to honor: a headline performance at Tower Grove Park to benefit the Cesar Chavez's fledgling migrant farmworker organization, the United Farmworker's Union. I wasn't about to stiff a benefit gig to raise money for Cesar Chavez's noble
La Causa.
I got this idea to invite Bob to be the headliner at the UFW benefit concert and I'd be his opening act. To my surprise, Bob's enthusiasm for playing the gig was unconditional, even if there wasn't any pay involved. At the benefit, I played my set and then Bob came on and did exactly what I knew he'd do...
blow me off the stage. I figured if I was going out and at the end of my music career, I might as well go out at the top, playing on same bill as a great player like Bob.
Bob was awarded a PhD in Blues from Washington Univeristy in St. Louis. I'm not pulling your leg on this....Bob designed his own unique curriculum for a PhD in Blues in his self directed doctorate program in music at Washington University. I think Bob liked the idea of billing himself as the Doctor of the Blues and having the appropriate academic credentials to do so.
Later on, Bob told me about an extraordinary aspect of his own musical development as a child. Bob's uncle, Barney Josephson, was a prominent club owner who ran the legendary Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, one of the first places in New York, or anywhere, where black and white musicians played on-stage together.
I learned a lot from my casual and passing aquaintance with Bob Brozman. The few times we had a chance to talk, all our conversations were limited to blues trivia, antecdotes about the various old blues masters we each had met, and blues playing techniques. It was the kind of subject matter that only the geekiest of music fans would find entertaining.
A year or so after my first encounter with Bob Brozman at Duffs, I packed my bags and headed out to the East Coast to obtain an undergrad degree in critical theory at University of Massachusetts.
During the intervening years, I never heard anything about Bob. Bob Brozman's fate remained a mystery until one day in 1988 I came across a recently issued album by Bob called
The Devil's Slide. at Tower Records in Boston. After developing a cult following from a decade of live performances, Bob's music career was starting to take off. Bob has since recorded 17 albums and two concert videos and traveled every corner of the globe from Europe, to Asia ,to Australia bringing the message of the blues to all. Paraphrasing the great Tom Waits, Bob was even
big in Japan.
Over the years, Bob has expanded his musical oeuvre to include music with broader cross cultural focus. Bob was awarded best slide guitarist in the 2008 Accoustic Guitar magizine's Reader's Choice Awards. Follow the little blue underlined link to visit
Bob Brozman's website
I selected three short clips from a guitar instruction video Bob once recorded to give you an idea of his incredible range as a guitarist. He's playing his instrument of choice, the National Steel resonator guitar which was an embedded resonator to amplify the sound of the guitar. In the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the development of electric guitar, the National Steel guitar was the favored instrument of many blues musicians because the chiming sound of the guitar's resonating speaker could be heard over loud din of a juke joint or noisy roadhouse.
Song #3 is essential straight-in-your-face Mississippi blues bottleneck in the style that Bob was playing when I first heard him in the Seventies:
Song #2 is a short demonstration of Bob's unique percussive style of playing. Bob once pointed out to me that nearly all of the great early blues guitarists pounded away at their guitars like the were perscussion instruments. Another great guitarist, John Fahey chided those guitarists who feared their guitar and played it delicately. Fahey's line was "stop playing your guitar like as sissy and hit it like you want to break it in two."
Song #1 is a demonstration Bob's newer culturally blended playing style where he puts it all together in a song called
Down the Road. In this one short song you can hear elements of delta blues, ragtime, calypso and the earliest New Orleans 2nd line style of jazz.
Down the Road an amazing
tour de force of stylistic guitar playing