ABOUT THE CD:
"Live New York City 1982," originally pulled from Grammy-finalist roots music master David Bromberg’s tape stash for limited edition sales a few years ago, is the only recording to date of the David Bromberg Quartet (DBQ) but sounds as fresh as if recorded on their current spring/summer tour. Newly remastered for re-release on Appleseed, and now sporting droll, informative liner notes by David, "Live NYC 1982" features three of the current members of the Quartet – Bromberg (vocals, guitar, fiddle, mandolin), award-winning fiddler Jeff Wisor (also mandolin, harmony vocals), and “Butch” Amiot (bass guitar, harmony vocals) – and Gene Johnson (mandolin, fiddle, harmony vocals), who now plays with the successful country/bluegrass band Diamond Rio and was eventually replaced by ex-Greenbriar Boy Bobby Tangrea. David’s own bluegrass credentials include performing or recording with Jerry Douglas, Vassar Clements, Doc Watson, Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka and other pantheon-level pickers, as well as playing countless folk, country, and pop sessions for everyone from Bob Dylan to Dion. (Bromberg, Tangrea, and Wisor are also part of Chum, the backing group for Angel Band, the vocal trio led by Bromberg’s wife, Nancy Josephson; the second Angel Band CD, "With Roots & Wings," was released in May by Appleseed.)
The DBQ’s breathtaking mixture of precision and abandon, both instrumentally and vocally, is quickly established by the medley of fiddle tunes that spins off "Live NYC 1982’s" opening “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down,” as guitar, fiddle, and mandolin weave a high-speed whirlwind out of “Red Apple Rag,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “Dixie Hoedown” and other traditional finger-busters, climaxing in a three fiddle rave-up (with David playing the first fiddle he built while on hiatus).
Interspersed between exuberant, uptempo bluegrass staples such as “Stay All Night” and “Sally Gooden” are more leisurely standards, including “Dark Hollow,” “On Our Last Date” (a melancholy Conway Twitty – Floyd Cramer song), a lovely instrumental called “Ookpik Waltz,” and a pair of acoustic blues numbers (Leroy Carr’s “Midnight Hour Blues” and Furry Lewis’s hilarious “The Creeper’s Blues,” a tale of man versus bedbug). More contemporary fare includes Bob Dylan’s country waltz, “Wallflower” (which he and David first recorded for a Doug Sahm album), David Massengill’s delicate “Fairfax County” murder ballad, and Ralph McTell’s humorous Old West pastiche, “When I Was a Cowboy.” Aside from adapting and arranging all of the traditional material here, Bromberg also wrote the road lament, “The New Lee Highway Blues” (“It was a stinking summer trip to Southern hell”). High, lonesome harmonies, mindboggling instrumental chops, and a contagious sense of fun make "Live New York City 1982" a must-have release for Bromberg’s many fans, old and new, and for all lovers of acoustic American music.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
He can awe an audience into pindrop silence with a solo acoustic blues or goose his fans to their feet with a bluegrass reel by his Quartet or an R&B romp by his Big Band. David Bromberg has spent his life absorbing traditional music from its surviving creators and their recordings so convincingly – while adding his own instrumental twists – that he has become a part of musical tradition itself, as close to the source of American roots music as anyone alive. Folk, blues, bluegrass, ragtime, you name it – he has become The Real Deal.
Born in Philadelphia in 1945 and raised in Tarrytown, NY, Bromberg listened to rock ’n’ roll “and whatever else was on the radio” as a kid. “I discovered Pete Seeger and The Weavers and, through them, Reverend Gary Davis,” says Bromberg. “I then discovered Big Bill Broonzy, who led me to Muddy Waters and the Chicago blues. This was more or less the same time I discovered Flatt & Scruggs, which led to Bill Monroe and Doc Watson.”
Bromberg started studying guitar when he has 13 and later enrolled as a musicology major at Columbia University. The mid-Sixties folk scene drew David to the downtown Greenwich Village clubs and coffeehouses, where he could watch and learn from the best performers, including primary sources such as his inspiration and mentor, the blind singer and guitarist Reverend Davis, who traded instrumental tips for David’s services as a guide dog to lead him to his performing engagements.
Bromberg’s sensitive and versatile approach to guitar-playing earned him jobs playing the Village “basket houses” for tips, the occasional paying gig, and lots of employment as a backing musician for Tom Paxton, Jerry Jeff Walker and Rosalie Sorrels, among others. He became a first-call, “hired gun” guitarist for recording sessions, ultimately playing on hundreds of records by artists including Bob Dylan ("New Morning," "Self Portrait," "Dylan"), Link Wray, The Eagles, Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, Carly Simon, and Chubby Checker.
An unexpected and wildly successful solo spot at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival in Great Britain led to a solo deal with Columbia Records, for whom David recorded four albums. His eponymous 1971 debut not only included the mock-anguished “Suffer to Sing the Blues,” a Bromberg original that became an FM radio staple, but also “The Holdup,” a songwriting collaboration with former Beatle George Harrison, on which Harrison also played slide guitar on the track. Through Bromberg’s manager, David also met the Grateful Dead and wound up with four of their members, including Jerry Garcia, playing on his next two albums.
Bromberg’s range of material, based in the folk and blues idioms, continually expanded with each new album to encompass bluegrass, ragtime, country and ethnic music, and his touring band grew apace. By the mid-’70s, the David Bromberg Big Band included horn-players, a fiddler, and several multi-instrumentalists, including David himself, who started playing violin around 1970.
Despite jubilant, loose-limbed concerts and a string of acclaimed albums on the Fantasy label, Bromberg found himself exhausted by the logistics of the music business. “I decided to change the direction of my life,” he explains. So David dissolved his band in 1980, and he and his artist/musician wife, Nancy Josephson, moved from Northern California to Chicago, where David attended the Kenneth Warren School of Violin Making. Though he still toured periodically, the recordings slowed to a trickle and then stopped.
After “too many Chicago winters,” in 2002 David and Nancy were lured to Wilmington, Del., where they became part of the city’s artist-in-residence program and where David could establish David Bromberg Fine Violins, a retail store and repair shop for high quality instruments. Frequent participation in the city’s weekly jam sessions helped rekindle Bromberg’s desire to make music again, as did the encouragement of fellow musicians. The jams also led to the formation of Angel Band, fronted by Nancy and two other female vocalists, with David serving as an accompanist.
A series of low-key solo sessions at a nearby studio led to the 2007 release of "Try Me One More Time," an increased tour schedule, and a Grammy nomination for the stunned Bromberg: “Previously, my name never was spoken in the same sentence as the word ‘Grammy’.” With two or three new recording projects in formative stages and the re-release of "Live New York City 1982," plus an ever-growing performance itinerary, he may hear that word again – over the applause of his enraptured audiences, the tributes by his musical contemporaries and the raves of appreciative critics.
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