Jamie Jobb's Backstage Pass: Bob Brozman

The twenty-seven-piece Bob Brozman Orchestra assembled for “Lumière” (2007)

Broken String Legacy:

Bob Brozman (1954-2013)

by Jamie Jobb

On long car trips, we like to pop in the CD of Bob Brozman’s massive solo album “Lumière”, a “collection of musical postcards” that’s perhaps the single most outrageous solo performance project ever produced by a musician. Certainly it’s more than a mere “concept album”. “Lumière” takes your ears around the world in a dozen tunes. Every track is worth hearing more than once and it’s perfect music for driving Interstate highways in the West.

The tracklist is indeed a virtual international musical tour: “N’Oubliez Pas La Réunion” takes us to an Indian Ocean island; “Calypso Calaloo” to Trinidad; “Chaturangui Gazal” to Turkey, Greece, Iran; “Mazurka Maracaibo” down to Venezuela; “Aloha Laie” to Hawaii; “Bamako Blues” - West Africa; “Ska Waltz Train” - Jamaica; “Afro Mada” - East Africa; “Yaeyama Okinawa” - Japan. The album also includes three other tunes of more generic “worldly” derivation … “Tango Medzinárodny” - an “international tango”; “Lumière De La Mer” - an “island of imagination” and “Mars Over Sorrento” - set somewhere in the sunny south. None of it requires a passport to listen.

Just composing such a cross-section of world music would have been enough for most musicians. But Brozman, a self-proclaimed “roving guitar anthropologist”, took his project to obsessive lengths. Every note from every instrument on every tune on the album flowed from the fingers of that one man pictured twenty seven times in a fez above.

Presenting himself as a totally digital one-man band -- “The Bob Brozman Orchestra” -- he dubbed new tracks over-and-over the initial track, himself playing each new instrument onto the others one-at-a-time! Sometimes Daniel Thomas, who mixed and mastered the tracks at Moon Rocks Studio in Santa Cruz, would lay down an initial percussive riff but all the notes came from Brozman’s spontaneous handy work. Thus he built up his tunes like a sonic layer cake, with each instrument laid over the next, and all played by the same talented yet troubled guy.

* * *

Brozman studied ethnomusicology at Washington University in St. Louis, concentrating on Delta blues and ragtime, which gave him ample opportunity to sample the unique layering of blues and jazz along the Mississippi River … Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, The Delta, New Orleans. That’s when he began collecting “souvenirs” of his travels -- old tunes, musical licks and tuning techniques picked up from vernacular bluesmen working those back porches, juke joints and night clubs along the river. He also began collecting odd acoustic string instruments, particularly resophonic guitars and strange ukuleles.

Rather than remain in the American heartland after college in 1976, Brozman moved West and settled in the very eclectic community of Santa Cruz California where he gained fame as a downtown busker. The Guardian of London wrote he quickly “became a local celebrity, with his photo printed in the local paper ... police banned him from singing on Pacific Avenue because he attracted such a large crowd that it caused traffic problems.” Brozman eventually settled out of town in the Santa Cruz mountains on a small farm full of fruit trees, grapevines and "herds of chickens".

Most often I saw Brozman perform in Berkeley with the Cheap Suit Serenaders at their annual Freight and Salvage gig. These were storied concerts and hard tickets to get -- particularly at the old Freight on Addison. There you could talk easily with musicians as the stage and CD sales counter were together right there where the bathroom line went down the hall. So musicians often would chat with folks in line during intermission or after a show. It was a tight space and Brozman was a small excitably bespeckled guy with a large black beard and bright shirts. He wasn’t really comfortable there in public and he wasn’t particularly friendly either.

But he was very very funny on stage, although his wit could be quite bitter. Things would get interesting later in these Cheap Suit sets when Bob and Terry Zwigoff would get into bits of biting banter that sometimes lasted longer than their songs. The erasable Zwigoff has gone on to become famous as an iconoclastic filmmaker, but he was the one Suit who most often stood up to Brozman’s stage quips. The other Suits tended to stay out of it, although they’d toss in a one-liner now and then.

It turns out, the talented Santa Cruz musician was not always highly admired within the Bay Area music community. Despite his obvious talents, some considered him conceited, pompous, condescending. That attitude did not help when Brozman’s legacy came into question after his suicide in 2013. Initial reports indicated Brozman took his life because he could no longer tolerate the pain in his fingers which reportedly resulted from a 1980 auto accident.

However, later reports from Santa Cruz indicated that he may have chosen to end his life at age 59 rather than face pending allegations of child molestation in court. One non-profit website, the Country Blues, chose to drop Brozman from its listing of artist profiles because the organization considered his legal issues credible enough to render him unworthy of any further promotion (see links below), although no court case ever materialized.

Former Brozman fans have commented on line that they can’t stand to listen to his music anymore, and that’s understandable. It’s also quite sad really that such a horrible personal matter ultimately discredits a rare effort like “Lumière”. Those incredible musical tracks are now difficult to hear. But anyone who can look past allegations that taint Brozman’s name may still find ways to appreciate the music he left behind.

Bob Brozman Links

The “Lumière” album:

http://www.bobbrozman.com/lumiere.html

The London Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jul/13/worldmusic.shopping2

“The Life and Legacy of Bob Brozman”:

http://www.santacruz.com/news/the_life_and_legacy_of_bob_brozman.html

Removal from Country Blues artist profile listings:

http://www.thecountryblues.com/artist-reviews/bob-brozman/

“The Dark Side of Genius” from Santa Cruz:

http://www.santacruz.com/news/the_dark_side_of_genius.html

“The Strange Case of Bob Brozman”:

http://www.acidlogic.com/strange_case_of_bob_brozman.htm

“Can’t listen anymore” department:
http://wimwords.com/2014/01/11/from-the-stacks-bob-brozman-hello-central-give-me-dr-jazz/