Subject: David Bromberg Article
From:
Joe Offer
Date: 06 Jun 02 - 02:44 PM
Aw, I think it's worth posting.
-Joe Offer-
http://sunspot.net/features/lifestyle/bal-to.bromberg06jun06.story
Fine tuning '70s guitarist David Bromberg works to redefine his career, as well as the second-fiddle status of the American-made violin. By Michael Ollove
Baltimore Sun Staff
June 6, 2002
WILMINGTON, Del. - Having not laid eyes on David Bromberg in more than 25 years - and even then it was from the cheap seats and through a haze of cigarette and marijuana smoke - I didn't have much to go on. As I looked around the churchly quiet coffee shop, what I had in mind were the words from one of the songs he sang, "I know I ain't good-looking, but I swear I'm some sweet woman's angel child." Like I said, not much to go on.
He was skinny, gawky and 30-ish back then, with rimless glasses, thick, curly hair and a sparse beard and wispy mustache that you'd only excuse on a 14-year-old. If then. But if his appearance might have suggested tentativeness or naivete, nothing in his music or his performances confirmed the impression.
Always around Bromberg was the air of the troublemaker. Not in the sense of violence or malevolence, but trouble in its most appealing version. His musical persona was brazen, sassy and comically subversive. He was a wise guy and a delinquent who would live life as recklessly as he chose, and only then deal with the consequences. Yeah, he killed his cheating lover; that's why he's here to tell the judge in an old blues number to "Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair." As we emerged from Vietnam and Watergate, Bromberg offered the sort of sly rebelliousness that hewed closely to the self-image many of us flattered ourselves with.
What may have failed to register, except in the most visceral way, was how learned his music was, how deeply it tapped into the richest strains of American music: folk, blues, country and rock, with nods to Dixieland jazz and Irish. His music came from someplace.
Bromberg, now 56, had a large following, particularly on college campuses, but you could never say his was a mainstream name in pop music. He recorded albums, but sitting in a studio was torture to an impatient man who yearned only for the live performance. While he was not the best known of the old Greenwich Village folk crowd, hardly any article about Bromberg from that period failed to use the phrase, "a musician's musician" largely because of those, including Bob Dylan, Richie Havens and Jerry Jeff Walker, who sought him out as a sideman.
"He has a completely personal style of playing the guitar so that just from his finger work, you know it's David Bromberg," says Jay Ungar, who played fiddle in Bromberg's band in the 1970s and is probably best known as the composer of "Ashokan Farewell," the signature music heard in PBS' Civil War series. "The tone, the attack, the phrasing. It's very bluesy and gutsy. But he also has this sweet side of playing. There are these two extremes. One is very gutsy and hard-driving, the other tender."
As accomplished as he was and as commanding a stage performer, Bromberg largely disappeared from public view in the early '80s. It was rare to see any mention of his concerts or a new album. It was rare to hear mention of him at all. Although his music never seemed dated or cliched, Bromberg himself seemed to have all but vanished.
But you never really vanish, at least not to yourself. I might have lost track of Bromberg, but he never did, even as he completely reinvented himself, or at least his career. David Bromberg, audacious musician, had become David Bromberg, violin salesman.
Obviously, I had some catching up to do in his story, which is what had brought me to this Wilmington coffee shop, where I was told the troublemaker was quietly having a sandwich.
And, unmistakably, there he was, sitting alone at the table in the rear, thicker than I remembered, and grayer, but still with oversized glasses and that same ungovernable beard.
He quickly proved that the unflappability evident in his music did not extend to the man. It was apparent that this was not, unlike the characters in his music, an imperturbable person.
"This is the worst period in my life to do an interview," he said in the course of our meeting. His life, he said, was in upheaval. He had just arrived from Boston, where he had attended a hugely important but pressure-packed violin auction. The next day, he was to begin one of the mini-tours he still does with his band each year. He is also relocating his family from Chicago to Wilmington this summer while making a risky change in the nature of his business. In a few minutes, he had to take off in a borrowed car to the Philadelphia airport to pick up his wife and the younger of his two teen-age children, and later he was to meet with band members to go over their program.
This was not, NOT, a good time to do an interview. But, there wasn't going to be a better time, so why not just get it over with.
I wanted him to take a deep breath. Actually, I wanted him to take a Valium. He agreed to let me accompany him to the airport, and on I-95 he related what had happened to him after I lost track of him.
In the late 1970s, he left New York to follow his manager to Northern California. Musically speaking, it was a disastrous move because it isolated him. "There weren't people around that it was any fun to play music with." So, he didn't. He didn't practice and he didn't compose. When he did play, he felt he was only faking it, that he wasn't being true to the calling.
After awhile, Bromberg came to a troubling realization. "I decided I wasn't really a musician anymore."
Musical sponge
It was a cataclysmic piece of self-discovery. Music had been the inspiration and the engine of his entire life, and had put him, the son of a Jewish psychiatrist from the suburbs of New York, on a wholly unexpected path. From the time he was a child and a black caretaker exposed him to gospel music, Bromberg had been a musical sponge, soaking up and falling in love with all kinds of disparate music, no matter how far removed from his own life.
In high school, it was blues and rock; in college at Columbia, blues and folk. He was open to anything, everything, including even Bohemian music and Balkan folk.
He taught himself the guitar as a teen-ager, but when he learned that blind blues guitarist Rev. Gary Davis lived in New York, Bromberg tracked the legend down and begged him to take him on as a student. Davis agreed, but the lessons would not be limited to his apartment. He had Bromberg lead him to black churches and clubs everywhere in the city to hear the best gospel and blues around.
Bromberg quit Columbia after his second year, and soon became a fixture performing in Greenwich Village and living on wages tossed into baskets. He hung around with many future stars also transversing the Village, including Dave Van Ronk, Stephen Stills, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt and Dylan. He often jammed with them, and many of those cutting records prevailed on him to play guitar for them. He performed on records by Dylan, Ringo Starr, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Paxton, Tom Rush and dozens of others.
Eventually, Bromberg formed his own band, complete with horn and rhythm sections. Playing in it, Ungar says, was a blast.
"As a bandleader, he was very inspiring. The ethos of the band was if it excited us, if it turned us on, he encouraged that. The arrangement was loose; there was a structure in which we could improvise as soloists. Everyone fired everyone else up, whether trying to outdo each other or to make someone else in the band smile."
If the move to California brought an end to that period of Bromberg's life, it was only factor. His relationship with his record label, which always had a hard time figuring out how to market his eclectic music, was becoming intolerably acrimonious. But he also felt himself burned out after 20 years on the road. In 1979, he had married an artist named Nancy Josephson, and he knew that constantly touring, which had always invigorated him, was not conducive to the family life he wanted. He concluded that it was time to pull back from the music.
Fortunately, it was not a decision that left him bereft, because by the time he reached it, he had found another passion. The violin.
Trading trades
The violin had not been his primary instrument, but he had developed a fascination with it, with the richness of its history and the variety of the craftsmanship. He loved hearing about the instruments, reading about them, examining them. While on tour, he often dropped into music shops, and if a violin appealed to him, he'd buy it. He didn't know much about the instruments, so he often sought advice or evaluations from some of the leading American violin dealers.
The more he talked violins, the more convinced he was that he had found his second career. "The only intellectual stimulation I got was sitting in a violin shop," he said.
But first he had to educate himself in the esoterica of fine violins, to learn how to evaluate the wood, the varnish, the cut of the F-holes and scroll. As in art and wine, separating the good from the bad requires depth of knowledge and the confidence to apply it.
Bromberg decided the best way to acquire that knowledge was to learn how to make violins himself. So, he enrolled in the Chicago School of Violin Making, one of the best in the country.
Josephson says it wasn't so surprising that her husband would take so sharp a turn in his life or to decide to try to master a whole new field. For one thing, she says, he is constitutionally a bold man. For another, "He is a compulsive learner. He gets totally obsessed with whatever has turned whatever screw in his head right now."
He graduated from violin-making school after four years, sold violins for a prestigious Chicago dealer and then, after a year or so, went out on his own as an independent wholesaler. Now, he says with evident pride, "I'm better known in the violin trade than in the music world."
He travels around the United States and, three times a year, ventures to Europe searching out fine violins for clients, including collectors, stores and individual users.
It is not a profession for the indecisive or apprehensive. Wholesalers must have complete confidence in their ability to recognize the quality of an instrument and to place a value on it.
"You don't get rich doing this," says Bromberg, "but you better know what you're doing or you'll lose your shirt."
Finally, there was some of the swagger I recognized from Bromberg's music.
New recognition
Where Bromberg's impact has been greatest in violins is in his personal collection, which numbers more than 200 instruments. Significantly, it includes many pre-1950 American models.
American-made violins have traditionally been perceived as inferior to those made in Europe, which, after all, produced the most renowned names in violin-making, including Stradivari, Guarneri and Oliveria. They were considered artists; Americans were dismissed as glorified carpenters.
But Bromberg came to believe the prejudice unjustified. Americans have made extremely high-quality violins for two centuries, but the results were too scattered to bring enough attention to that truth. On tour as a musician, he found those high-quality instruments in shops all over the country and bought them. "I'd say I'm collecting fine American violins, and they'd just laugh in my face, saying there aren't any."
Even before he was a violin-maker, he guessed they were wrong. Afterward, he knew it.
By bringing together in a single collection many examples of fine American violins, Bromberg has single-handedly dispelled the myth of American inferiority. He has even held exhibits in the United States and abroad to drive home the point.
"David has been a central figure in calling the attention of dealers both in the U.S. and abroad to American-made violins," says Ron Midgett, owner of Easthampton Violin Co. in Massachusetts. "He's basically saying, 'The proof is in the pudding. You say there were no high-quality American violins, and here they are.'"
After living in Chicago for more than 20 years, Bromberg and Josephson began pining for a return to the East Coast, and they soon settled on Wilmington, where Bromberg's tour manager lived. The city of Wilmington, which wants to promote its downtown arts district, was eager to have the Brombergs too.
City officials agreed to essentially give a 3 1/2 -story building near the Grand Opera House to the Brombergs in return for a commitment that they stay for seven years and that David give a few performances a year. On the first floor, Bromberg will operate a retail violin shop, something he has not done before. He also estimates that it will cost $600,000 to renovate the building.
The whole venture, he says, scares him to death. "It's a huge gamble. I'm going into hock up to my kishkas."
The violin career has been deeply satisfying, Bromberg says, and oddly enough, it's helped return the pleasures of the musical career to him as well. He never completely stopped touring. A few times a year, he would bring together the same old band members. Even if there's a lot more heft and a lot less hair, playing with them now feels better than ever.
"The music is no longer an obsession," he says. "Strangely enough, having left it, I appreciate it in a way I didn't when I was living it all the time, what a privilege it is, what a tremendous joy, what a pleasure."
I left him in the coffee shop but the next night sat in the audience at the Birchmere in Alexandria to watch him doing what he was doing the first time I saw him all those years ago. On stage, I saw a bearded man hunched over an electric guitar as he broke into "Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair," his bearish body awkward except for nimble fingers tumbling over the strings. His lips curled in a devilish smile.
He looked, I thought happily, like trouble.
Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun
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