Bob Brozman, a guitarist and self-described “roving guitar anthropologist” who collaborated with musicians from Northern Ireland to Guinea to India to Papua New Guinea, died on April 23 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 59.
The cause was suicide, said Mike Pruger, the coroner’s deputy in Santa Cruz County.
Mr. Brozman’s music was rooted in the blues, but the open tunings, syncopations and microtonal inflections of the blues inspired him to soak up styles worldwide.
He was a traveler and collector who learned to play many other stringed instruments, from the Andean charango to the Greek baglama. He visited musicians around the world at their homes, studying with them and collaborating with them on recordings that brought new twists to traditional styles. He was especially fond of island cultures where, he told Songlines magazine, “musical instruments and ideas are left behind without much instruction and then left to percolate in isolation.”
His main instrument was the National steel guitar: a gleaming Art Deco-style instrument with a broad dynamic range, often played with a slide and associated with deep blues. He wrote a book, “The History and Artistry of National Resonator Instruments,” and designed a lower-pitched guitar, the Baritone Tricone (with three cone-shaped resonators), for the company, which is now called National Reso-Phonic Guitars.
He recorded dozens of albums, including solo projects and collaborations with musicians like the Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Ledward Kaapana, the Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya, the Guinean kora player Djeli Moussa Diawara, the Okinawan sanshin player and singer Takashi Hirayasu and the accordionist René Lacaille from the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. He also made instructional videos about ukulele, bottleneck blues, Caribbean rhythms and Hawaiian guitar.
Mr. Brozman approached traditional styles with curiosity, respect and energy. “I don’t expect them to meet me halfway musically,” he said of his collaborators in an interview with the British magazine Guitar. “I try to meet up about three-quarters of the way towards them.”
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