Bob Brozman
One-Man Multicultural Roadshow
by Michael Parrish

Bob Brozman wears many hats. First and foremost, he is a musician whose work with vintage National and Weissenborn guitars has elevated the art of playing with a slide to a high art. Secondly, he is a music historian and author who has penned the authoritative reference work on National guitars and has compiled a number of CDs of vintage guitar music. As a master teacher, he has produced a wonderful series of instructional videos for Homespun tapes.

As an esoteric scholar whose interests include the neurobiology of music, Brozman colorfully described the process of music making and listening. "I use a colloidal suspension of salt water in my head, which is run by a weak electrical signal, to push my muscles around in order to push the strings to vibrate air molecules in a certain way which activate the hair cells in the recipients' ears which activate their colloidal suspensions of salt water. They get a change of blood chemistry that they perceive as feeling. That's science but it gives me a sense or privilege and reverence about it. It's really nice. The part of it I'm fascinated by, is what's going on in the zone between the neurobiology and meaning. That's a big, big area."

Another fascination of Brozman's is the key role his chosen instrument, the steel guitar, has played in the dissemination of roots music styles in the last century and even earlier. "I think it is a natural human instinct, when confronted with a string, to eventually slide something along it. The origins of slide are somewhat lost in the mists of pre-recorded time. Slide guitar in India goes back to the eleventh century, played with a glass ball. There are some African instruments, then there is the whole Hawaiian thing, which comes down to one or two people having invented it. However, things get murky because there were travelling Hawaiian groups in the south and some black guys went and saw that and started playing slide because of that. Casey Bill Welton, a slide guy from the 30s, called himself the Hawaiian guitar wizard and played it flat on his lap. So did Oscar Woods, so did Black Ace, and even Charlie Patton, on a couple of tracks.

"Delta blues open G tuning is exactly the same tuning that is the main tuning used in Hawaiian music. It's also the tuning Debashish uses, it's also found in the Phillipines, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America. It's almost the universal tuning of colonial musicians. Open G is the tuning that makes an open chord that you can get to with the least amount of string changing from standard tuning. All these cultures arrived at it separately.

"Because I'm interested in linguistics, and the spread of languages, that's all tied in with the music. You can trace seven different back-and-forth movements musically between Cuba and Africa. There were several different waves of new input from Africa to Cuba, or from Cuba to West Africa. I'm quite fascinated with that," Brozman explained. "The guitar is the ultimate colonial instrument; it was carried everywhere. All the way from India back to the Pacific across the Americas and back to Europe, the spread of the guitars is remarkable."