Bob Brozman

Bob Brozman ( born March 8, 1954 in New York City; † April 23, 2013 in Santa Cruz, California ) was an American guitarist and musicologist who felt obliged alongside jazz and blues and world music.

Life and work

Even in earliest childhood Bob was confronted with the music. At age six, he began to play the guitar and felt the sound as a great challenge. As a student of music and ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, he worked with a large, global community of musicians that ranged from the Okinawa Islands to Ghana. Accordingly, great was the number of music styles, which he brought to hearing: Gypsy jazz, calypso, blues, ragtime, Hawaiian and Caribbean music. So Brozman was a prized accompanying guitarist and a fundus of the 20th century of world music. Brozman was over the whole year between North America and Europe on the road, where he performed mainly, but also in Australia, Asia and Africa. At the end of his life the Hawaiian guitarist had an impressive collection of instruments he had brought back from his travels around the earth.

He recorded numerous albums and has been honored three times with the American Guitar Player handset price for the best blues. In 1999, Brozman and Woody Mann a guitar school that taught more than 120 students annually at sites in California, New York and Canada. In the years 2000 to 2005, he had five in the European top 10 for world music, as he had become much more popular in Europe in his last ten years than in his home country.

Bob Brozman was found dead at his home in Santa Cruz, California on the evening of 23 April 2013. He took his own life because he could move, according to his longtime producer and collaborator Daniel Thomas by the after-effects of a 1980 car accident suffered his hands only in pain for guitar playing.

Discography

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