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by Paul Bass | Jul 3, 2008 10:10 am

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Posted to: Arts

David Bromberg doesn’t know what songs he’ll play when he takes the Little Theater stage Sunday. But if he plays Mr. Bojangles, you can predict what notes he’ll play—including the solo.

Bromberg crafted the ultimate solo on that song back in the 1970s. He dropped largely out of public view for close to three decades. Now he’s tiptoed back into public performance. New Haven will have a chance to watch up close a master guitarist who played Carnegie Hall and jammed with Bob Dylan, Rev. Gary Davis, and countless other folk and blues greats in his prime.

Bromberg appears at the cozy Little Theater, the converted former Lincoln moviehouse at the dead end of Lincoln Street, Sunday, July 6, at 3 p.m. The group Angel Band opens. (Ticket info here.)

A product of the 1960s Greenwich Village folk revival scene (he transferred from Columbia to the campus of Washington Square Park and Gerde’s Folk City), Bromberg first made his name as a sideman. He played acoustic and electric guitar on over 150 folk, blues and rock records (including Dylan’s criminally underappreciated New Morning).

One of his touring gigs was with Jerry Jeff Walker, who wrote the classic “Mr. Bojangles.” Bromberg played that song so often that he got a chance to refine his acoustic solo to perfection: a cascade of fluid picking that ascends to a raw, hushed, tender finale of single bent strings. Pure beauty.

“That was improvised when I first started playing it with Jerry Jeff,” Bromberg, who’s now 62 and living in Wilmington, Del., said in a phone conversation. “It’s one of the few solos I play the same every time. It found its place and stays there. It’s got a lot of tricky scale passages across three strings.”

In 1970 Bromberg went solo. He toured the world, playing sets that alternated between rowdy full-band electric Chicago blues and solo acoustic traditional folk, country and Delta blues numbers. He had a string of vinyl releases, too, including 1977’s Out of The Blues, on which he preserved that incredible solo. You can hear it if you click on this video, then fast forward six minutes into the clip. (Although the visuals feature footage of Bromberg playing with Jerry Jeff Walker together, the audio is the Bromberg solo recording.)

Bromberg left the performing and recording scene for a foray into violins. (He had always fiddled in his concerts.) “I was living in northern California, Marin County,” he said. “About the only place I found real intellectual stimulation was in a violin shop. I was interested by the way a person could look at a violin, not look inside, and tell you” when and where it was built.

“Paper labels are so easy to replace and fake. It’s the violin itself you need to look at.
You can tell that by the outline, the arch the materials, and the type of craftsmanship, little details in how it was built.”

He decided to learn how to do that, too. he spent four years studying at a violin-making school. These days he runs a violin shop in Wilmington.

“When I moved to Wilmington, I started a couple of jam sessions, mostly because the mayor told me the street I lived on used to have a lot of live music,” Bromberg recalled. “It turned out I loved them. Some really fine musicians started coming. I started getting chops backs.”

And he started hitting the road again, a few gigs a month. He started recording again, too.

He never forgot the “Bojangles” solo.

“I just did a dvd for Stefan Grossman. We put that on it. I was very surprised , I played it flawlessly,” Bromberg said.

That doesn’t mean the song will necessarily be on the set list when Bromberg and his quartet arrive Sunday in New Haven. There is no set list.

“I go onstage,” he said, “and decide right before I go on, what I’m going to play first.” Whatever the songs, you can count on the playing to be crisp, at turns rowdy, at turns searing, gentle, and memorable throughout.

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