DVD Review: Par Avion

The first time I heard Bob Brozman was a few years back and at the time I was amazed at his abilities as a blues guitarist and vocalist. Aside from John Hammond Jr. I’d not heard another contemporary musician performing solo acoustic blues and be able to hold my attention for not only the length of a CD, but a 90-minute concert on DVD as well. So I was really surprised when talking to the publicist who had supplied me with those discs that he wasn’t considered to be primarily a blues performer. Here was a guy who sounded like he was burning a hole in the neck of his resonator guitar his slide was moving so slickly, and yet blues was only considered something he did on the side. How could that be possible?

Well it turns out that Brozman is one of the few people around who justly deserves to be described as a world music performer. Unlike the majority of people who happen to be given that label only because they were born in a non-English speaking country, Brozman actually plays music from all over the world. If it can be played on a stringed instrument, seemingly any kind of stringed instrument, there’s a damn good chance he’s played it at some point in his career. From the islands of Hawaii, Reunion Island off the coast of Madagascar, the Okinawa Islands, Papua New Guinea, India, France, to the blues of his native America Brozman has travelled the world for 30 years seeking out new music and new musicians to play with.

While there have been individual recordings made of most of these musical collaborations, for the first time music lovers have an opportunity to view clips of Brozman and those he’s worked with in action. A new DVD, Par Avion, for sale only through his web site, is a montage of video clips, still photos, and of course music, dating back to his early days as a street musician in the early 1970s. While age and dubious equipment means the quality of some of the clips aren’t the highest, it doesn’t prevent the DVD from being a incredibly fascinating document.

The movie opens with a couple of stills showing Brozman from his street musician days when he was making his living by travelling around America busking for a living. From there we move to 1978 for some faded black and white footage from Boulder Creek, California for two tunes, “Ukulele Spaghetti” and “Shake It And Break It.” Even at this age we see Brozman is already a virtuoso on his beloved resonators as he rocks the house on both a ukulele and guitar version of the old metal instruments. Combined with a clip from a local San Francisco news show in 1984, on which he’s seen playing “River Blues,” these pieces of video give viewers an indication of just how good a player Brozman is. With a voice like Leon Redbone and a dexterity on the fret-board like no one else, it’s obvious he could have easily been a huge success playing only the blues.

However, this is the man who once said in an interview, “If you’re bored it usually means you’re boring,” and he sure wasn’t about to let himself be either. The next few clips are from 1986 in Kailua Kona, Hawaii and feature Brozman playing Hawaiian pedal steel. This is a style of music that even then had long since gone out of fashion, and in an interview done at the time he admitted that when he played those types of events he was usually the youngest person performing as nobody else his age or younger seemed interested in the genre anymore. It turns out he learned how to play it listening to old 78 rpm records of Tau and Rose Moe, Hawaiian musical stars of the 1920s. Somehow or other Tau heard of Brozman and in 1988 invited him to their home in Oahu. The result was a recording of Hawaiian pedal steel and lap blues unlike any that had been released in decades.

While the video clips from the recording session are faded black and white and over-exposed in places, the sound quality is still crisp and clean. However the best moments are footage of Tau and Brozman sitting together jamming on their lap slide guitars against the backdrop of the Pacific ocean and lush green of the Moe house grounds. This section of the film ends with a beautiful shot of the two men walking along the beach together with Tau telling Brozman how much they appreciate a young guy like him from the mainland helping keep their music alive.

We then continue to hop, skip, and jump around the world and through the years with Brozman to watch him play swing music for ballroom dancers in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1992, give a brief introduction to resonator guitars for a Japanese television documentary in ’94, and then down to Santa Cruz, California to play some intricate jazz/blues with Martin Simpson of England. The hectic pace continues onto Okinawa, Reuion Island, Papua New Guinea, peppered with occasional stops at music festivals in Quebec City in Canada where he’s seen performing with his friends from around the world including Takashi Hirayasu from Okinawa, Rene Lacaille and Granmoun Lene from Reunion, and Debashish and Subhashis Bhattacharya from India.

From what I’ve described I’m sure Par Avion sounds a rather disjointed affair, jumping all over the place as it does. However, when putting the clips together editor Daniel Shane Thomas has taken the time to build in transitions which provide some on screen text background as to where we are going and who we are about to see perform. Of course the other connective devise is the movie’s subject matter, Bob Brozman. You can’t help but be caught up in his enthusiasm, and obvious love, for the music he’s playing and this, more than anything else, serves as the through line for the movie. Brozman is not your typical musical tourist, taking what he likes best of other people’s music and incorporating it into his own. Rather he’s there to learn how to play the music of whatever region he’s visiting, and then record it with the local musicians. Therefore, with each new place visited we learn a little more about the fascinating common language human beings from every part of the world share — music.

Bob Brozman lives for and loves music and he’s chosen to share some of what he has loved most over the last 30 years with us through the DVD Par Avion. If you’ve never heard or seen him play before, you’ve missed out on a truly extraordinary individual and musician and should take this chance to get to know him. The disc is only available through his web site, but it’s well worth your while to make that little extra effort to pick up a copy. You’ll be introduced to a whole new world of music.