All the while his hands are busy with the guitar, his foot is stomping out the bass drum line on the hard shell of one of his cases, driving the song along like the pistons of an engine. Watching Brozman play is such a confusion of arms, legs, and other body parts in motion that it's quite a wonder a song actually materializes out of the confusion.

But not only do they materialize, they are amazing to hear. He's traveled all over the world playing with musicians from Reunion Island off the coast of Madagascar, to Hawaii, to Papua New Guinea, and back to the Mississippi delta. Everywhere he's gone, he's picked up musical information he incorporates into his own creations.

But instead of treating them like precious relics that are to be kept on museum shelves and not to be tampered with, he plays with them to create new sounds that have the old as a solid base. Even songs like the old Edith Piaf standard "La Vie En Rose" are made into something new while hanging on to the elements that make them recognizable and enduring. 

The only other cover he performs on the whole DVD is the old Robert Johnson song "Love In Vain", which was made famous by those guys from England — the Rolling Stones. While he retains elements of the original song, his style of playing brings it new life and rescues it from its iconic status to make it a living, breathing blues song.

That's what makes his music so damn refreshing; not only is it some of the most alive and vital stuff going, it represents a gesture of defiance towards the pre-packaged, market-analyzed stuff that passes for popular music these days. Halfway through his set in this concert, he stops to teach his audience a quick lesson on the nature of rhythm in an attempt to break through the wall built up by conventional music that prevents people from truly feeling and hearing music anymore.

He proceeds to show that while most new music has only one beat to it, music like the old style blues, Hawaiian, African, and Indian have two distinct rhythms going at once in the same song. This is what gives those genres their vitality and ability to resonate an emotional chord in an audience. Being somewhat rhythmically challenged personally, I wasn't able to fully appreciate the distinctions he was trying to make, but I appreciated the incredible passion he was able to generate with his use of rhythm and melody while playing.

Recorded in a club in Cologne Germany, Bob Brozman Live In Germany is a study in how to make a great concert disc. Sure there is the advantage of working in a small venue, but it also looked like they had at least three handheld cameras on stage and two more in the audience for long shots. I don't know if they shot "live," editing while shooting, or took the raw footage and pieced it together afterwards.