Bob Brozman - Official Website

Bob Brozman in The United States of America

Bob was born and raised in New York, and lived in the Midwest while attending Washington University in 1972-76. In those years, Bob primarily worked in the St. Louis area during the year, playing four or five sets of music per night, five or six nights per week. Each summer he traveled across the country with a few musician friends, busking on the streets and in restaurants for meals all the way, with many adventures remembered by few. Many of the skills present today in Bob's playing were honed during this early period.

From 1976 to the present, Bob has made his home in the Santa Cruz mountains in Northern California, and from 1976 to 1980 played a heavy schedule of shows first around the San Francisco Bay Area, and then around California. From 1981 to 1987 Bob released several albums, and his travels took him all over the continental United States and Alaska.

Bob's Activities in the USA in more recent years:

Bob first went to Hawaii in 1986, where he met and jammed with Ledward Kaapana, and returned in 1988 when he had the opportunity to meet and record with the legendary Tau Moe Family, 60 years after their first recording. Bob's love of Hawaiian music as a young man led to his collecting the original 78rpm Hawaiian records, and reissuing many of them on CDs on the Rounder, Arhoolie/Folkyryic, and Shanachie labels. The acoustic Hawaiian guitar was nearly extinct when Bob began playing steel, and he has devoted much of his life to promoting this instrument, creating instructional videos and the Broz-O-Phonic Hawaiian steel bar. Bob has continued to return to Hawaii for further recordings with Led and with Cyril Pahinui.

From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, Bob concentrated on Europe, and later, Japan, though he still worked in the USA throughout the Northwest and West about twenty percent of the year. From the late 1990s to the present, his itinerary has grown to encompass most of the world. However, in the same period Bob has done several collaborative US tours with Ledward, Debashish and Subhashis Bhattacharya, Takashi Hirayasu, Martin Simpson, Cyril Pahinui, and Bob's band, the Thieves of Sleep.

Though in recent years, Bob has been collaborating with many foreign musicians, he has also found time to work with some fine American artists, both on recording projects and in other arenas. In 1999, with fellow New York guitarist/author Woody Mann, Bob released GET TOGETHER, an instrumental album of blues and roots music. In the same year, Bob and Woody founded International Guitar Seminars, a week-long intensive residence with several fine guitarist/instructors. Sessions have been held annually since 1999 in New York and in California.

In 2000, Bob recorded and released TONE POEMS III, with David Grisman and Mike Auldridge. With a grand collection of vintage Nationals, Dobros, Weissenborns and many more related American instruments, Tone Poems III surveys American string music 1915 to present, recorded live to analog. Tone Poems III has really become a favorite of Bob’s fans of his American style roots playing. In 2004, Bob again collaborated with Grisman, this time working with Norton Bufalo in creating a blues album for Vassar Clemens, Livin’ With The Blues.

Bob's 2006 schedule finds him traveling around the world, and thus he has only one more US concert listed, in California in August 2006. His next US appearance will be in Southern California in January 2007. Further information on concerts in the United States can be found on the Concert/Tour Schedule.