"An Evening of Acoustic Music" with David Bromberg and special guests The Angel Band

Just a handful of musicians can claim the rarified title of “multi-instrumentalist,” showing a proficiency and versatility otherwise unmatched in their musical fields. David Bromberg has worn the badge proudly for four decades. An acoustic guitarist without peer, Bromberg is also a virtuoso on mandolin, electric guitar, fiddle, dobro and pedal steel, and he’s equally at home playing folk, bluegrass, rock ‘n’ roll and country. That’s why he’s at the top of the list when someone talks about “a musician’s musician.” Bromberg’s chameleon-like stylistic abilities made him an in-demand sideman in the late 1960s and early ‘70s; Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, John Hurt, Jerry Jeff Walker, the Reverend Gary Davis, Tom Paxton, and Chubby Checker are among the notables who sought Bromberg out as a session player. In all he has played as a sideman on over 100 albums. But Bromberg, whose voice as an incisive singer/songwriter developed over years playing the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit, is also an extraordinary entertainer on his own. Besides his exemplary musicianship, he’s self-deprecating, funny and wildly unpredictable. Fronting his stellar Angel Band, he often stops tunes in the middle to explain their origins, or to talk about why he began playing the song in the first place. Bromberg and the Angel Band never use a pre-arranged set list; they take off on whatever journey Bromberg feels like on that particular night. Said the New York Times: “He has such control of his audience that he can, at one moment, hold it in his hand with a tender, touching yet funny anecdotal song, and then set it romping and stomping with a raucous bit of raunch. He is electrifying.” An iconoclast he is. At the height of his popularity, in 1980, Bromberg applied the brakes to his recording and performing career and enrolled in a Chicago violin-making school. Today he lives with his family in Wilmington, Delaware, and owns a violin sales and repair shop in the heart of the city. Whenever David Bromberg and the Angel Band take their eclectic show on the road, however, fans of the “real deal” turn out in droves – for the chance to see and hear, live in person, the country’s Number one “musician’s musician.”