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David Bromberg with Larry Campbell and Special Guest Eric Lichter with Larry Campbell

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As Bob Dylan, Jorma Kaukonen, Jerry Jeff Walker and many others can attest, David Bromberg is one of the greatest songwriters and string instrument players on the globe. Paired with Larry Campbell, another great master of stringed instruments and the producer of Bromberg’s last release, Only Slightly Mad, these two Grammy Award winning artists make their Infinity Hall Hartford debut on stage together for an amazing night of music and comradery that is not to be missed. Weaving in and out of the same musical circle the songs and the stories shared by these two artists unfold in a sea of pickin’, grinnin’ and unparalleled musicianship.

David Bromberg

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www.davidbromberg.net

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Artist Bio

“The reason man created stringed instruments. David touched them with a lover’s fingers and they moaned that true love right back at him. Wood and wire and flesh spoke.”

• Jerry Jeff Walker on David Bromberg

Summer 2013: record heat wave, prolonged economic slump, demise of the music business in full force. An old warhorse could be forgiven for wanting to coast or ride off into the sunset, but that’s not how this story goes: allow us to introduce David Bromberg, and his new album Only Slightly Mad, released by Appleseed Music on September 24^th.

You can tell a lot about a person from the company he keeps, and when that company has included Bob Dylan, The Beastie Boys, George Harrison, Emmylou Harris, Doc Watson, John Hiatt, Jerry Garcia, Reverend Gary Davis, Dr. John, Pete Seeger, Willie Nelson, John Prine, Phoebe Snow, Jerry Jeff Walker & Mississippi John Hurt you know you’re dealing with a very special case.

Born in Philadelphia in 1945 and raised in Tarrytown, NY, “as a kid I listened to rock ’n’ roll and whatever else was on the radio,” says Bromberg. “I discovered Pete Seeger and The Weavers and, through them, Reverend Gary Davis. I then discovered Big Bill Broonzy, who led me to Muddy Waters and the Chicago blues. This was more or less the same time I discovered Flatt and Scruggs, which led to Bill Monroe and Doc Watson.”

Bromberg began studying guitar at age thirteen and eventually enrolled in Columbia University as a musicology major. The Greenwich Village folk scene in the mid-’60s drew David to the downtown clubs and coffeehouses where he could watch and learn from the best, including primary sources such as his inspiration and teacher, the Reverend Gary Davis.

Bromberg’s sensitive and versatile approach to guitar-playing earned him jobs playing the Village “basket houses” for tips, the occasional paying gig, and employment as a backing musician for Tom Paxton, Jerry Jeff Walker and Rosalie Sorrels, among others. He became a first-call, “hired gun” guitarist for recording sessions, ultimately playing on hundreds of records by artists including Bob Dylan (New Morning, Self Portrait, Dylan), Link Wray, The Eagles, Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, and Carly Simon.

An unexpected and wildly successful solo spot for 600,000 listeners at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival in Great Britain led to a solo deal with Columbia Records, for whom David recorded four albums. His eponymous 1971 debut included “The Holdup,” a songwriting collaboration with former Beatle George Harrison, who also played slide guitar on the track. David also met the Grateful Dead and wound up with four of their members playing on his next two albums.

Bromberg’s range of material, based in the folk and blues idioms, continually expanded with each new album to encompass bluegrass, ragtime, country and ethnic music, and his touring band grew apace. By the mid-’70s, the David Bromberg Band included horn-players, a violinist, and several multi-instrumentalists, including David himself. Among the best-known Bromberg Band graduates: mandolinist Andy Statman, later a major figure in the Klezmer music movement in America, and fiddler Jay Ungar (who wrote the memorable “Ashokan Farewell” for Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, “The Civil War”).

Despite sold out concerts and a string of acclaimed albums on the Fantasy label, Bromberg found himself exhausted by the logistics of the music business. “I decided to change the direction of my life,” he explains. So David dissolved his band in 1980, and he and his artist/musician wife, Nancy Josephson, moved from Northern California to Chicago, where David attended the Kenneth Warren School of Violin Making. Though he still toured periodically, the recordings slowed to a trickle and then stopped.

After “too many Chicago winters,” in 2002 David and Nancy were lured to Wilmington, Del., where they became part of the city’s artist-in-residence program and where David could establish David Bromberg Fine Violins, a retail store and repair shop for high quality instruments. Frequent participation in the city’s weekly jam sessions helped rekindle Bromberg’s desire to make music again, as did the encouragement of fellow musicians Chris Hillman (The Byrds, Desert Rose Band, Flying Burrito Brothers) and bluegrass wizard Herb Pedersen.

With the release of the Grammy-nominated Try Me One More Time, his 2007 solo return to the studio, David continued his musical revitalization, playing shows on his own, with the David Bromberg Quartet, and reunions of the David Bromberg Big Band. In 2009, spurred by a suggestion from John Hiatt that David come to Hiatt’s Nashville studio to ‘mess around’, David came up with the idea for Use Me - an album featuring David with friends John Hiatt, Levon Helm, Los Lobos, Tim O’Brien, Vince Gill, Widespread Panic, Dr. John, Keb’ Mo’ and Linda Ronstadt. Each guest artist either wrote or selected a song and then produced David’s recording of their suggested tune, thereby fulfilling David’s request to ‘Use Me’. Partially detailing the proceedings, filmmaker Beth Kruvant directed the compelling film documentary David Bromberg; Unsung Treasure which has been making the rounds at film festivals.

In 2013, content with the balance of both his violin business and performing career, David was ready to record with his live band. Enlisting old friend Larry Campbell (three-time Grammy-winning producer for the late Levon Helm and multi-instrumentalist with Bob Dylan) and engineer Justin Guip, David and his group entered Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, NY, in March 2013. Enlisting some of Helm's recording and touring musicians for additional instrumentation, the David Bromberg Band emerged twelve days later with Only Slightly Mad, a return to his genre-bending albums of the Seventies and Eighties. Bromberg fans will find blues, bluegrass, gospel, folk, Irish fiddle tunes, pop and English drinking songs happily coexisting as only they can on a Bromberg album. For newcomers, Only Slightly Mad will be an introduction to an astonishing performer whose range and musical depth have delighted audiences for over forty years and for many years hence.

Larry Campbell

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www.larrycampbellmusic.net

LARRY CAMPBELL three time Grammy winning producer and multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell was born and raised in New York City and was the music director for the Levon Helm Band for eight years. Larry sings and plays mandolin, guitar, pedal steel, fiddle and other string instruments and was given a Lifetime Acheivement Award for instrumentalist by the Americana Music Association and voted Instrumentalist of the Year in 2013. Larry was a member of Bob Dylan’s band from 1997-2004 and he and his wife Teresa Williams can frequently be seen performing with Phil Lesh and Friends, Hot Tuna and Little Feat as well as performing on their own as a duo. Aside from producing many other records such as Hot Tuna’s Steady as She Goes, the long list of artists that Larry has performed and recorded with includes Paul Simon, Sheryl Crow, Rosanne Cash, Buddy and Julie Miller, Emmylou Harris, B.B. King, and many others.

Eric Lichter

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ericlichtermusic.bandcamp.com

Writing, crafting, and performing great songs is one thing that a lot of folks struggle with. Doing that all while making OTHER people's songs sound amazing is an entirely different beast. A beast that Eric Lichter has mastered again and again and is displayed strongly in all of the recordings that come out of his studio, Dirt Floor, in Chester Ct. Lichter's handy work as a producer, engineer, and studio musician is quite impressive.-Redline Roots, Boston MA. He's an obvious product of the Laurel Canyon sound, popularized by CSN, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and most recently Fleet Foxes, Dawes, Father John Misty and Beck.With two beautiful records under his belt (Chorduroy and OWL respectively) he’s busy at Dirt Floor (his recording studio) working on a follow up, with contributions from musical friends James Maple, Morganeve Swain, Jonah Tolchin, Kerri Powers and more.

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