Brian Bromberg: Of LaFaro and Reinvention

By Gary Fukushima I May. 29, 2024

“Maybe now after all these years I’m finally becoming the musician that I wanted to be,” says Bromberg.
(Photo: Michel Bocande)

Driving into the San Bernardino National Forest, some 40 miles east of Los Angeles, the two-lane road snakes through the suddenly steep cliffs blanketed by lush green pines. Reaching the humble town of Lytle Creek, there’s an automated gate off the side of the road that leads onto a sprawling ranch. Llamas are grazing in the far pasture against a sloping hill. A man waves from the entrance to one of the newer structures on the property. It’s Brian Bromberg, and this writer finally sees firsthand what a career in smooth jazz can do for one’s overall quality of life.

But that’s only partially true. Bromberg immediately explains he is not the owner of this place, and, as if on cue, a white BMW sedan drives by. He goes over to say hello to the man in the passenger seat, the actual owner: a former musician who made a fortune in the roofing tile business. Still a music lover, he enlisted Bromberg to design a state-of-the-art recording studio inside the building. Bromberg reveals that recent changes to his personal life have led him to this ranch at the invitation of its owner, living for now in another building a few steps from the studio.

After making coffee, he sits down in the hush of the studio’s luxurious control room. Bromberg, one of the foremost bassists in the world by any metric, begins by casually musing that he might also be one of the most misunderstood jazz musicians in the business, and that most of the jazz world might not even know who he is anymore.

I counter by telling him I first saw him play brilliantly back in the ’90s in a trio led by pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. “It was with Ignacio Berroa on drums,” he recalls, remembering the adventurous riposte he had with that band. It brings to his mind another encounter with none other than Herbie Hancock at a private event years ago. “After his 10th or 15th chorus on ‘Maiden Voyage,’” he reminisces, “he’s basically done everything you could ever imagine on a piano — and he hadn’t even got started yet. I didn’t sleep for three days. Talk about polar-opposite worlds … I’m sitting there like playing all the smooth jazz gigs and festivals all over the country — and now I’m with the greatest piano player on the planet playing the real shit.”

Bromberg, despite a steady stream of contemporary jazz hits, has consistently returned to the straightahead jazz well, interspersing albums of standards and acoustic originals among the 27 releases under his name. He acknowledges that his 28th is the straightest straightahead album he has done to date. “Oh, god, not only that it’s the most mature jazz I’ve ever done — it’s the most musical jazz record I’ve ever done,” he says. LaFaro (Be Squared Productions) is a tribute to the bassist Scott LaFaro, who even after tragically dying in a car crash in 1961 at age 25 remains immortalized as a part of the legendary Bill Evans Trio.

When asked to do the project, Bromberg wasn’t sure if he should. “I actually, at first, said no,” he admits. “[LaFaro] was kind of a legend, and I didn’t want to go there, and honestly, I’m just sick of people, you know, judging me.” Bromberg had previously released tribute albums for Jaco Pastorius, Jimi Hendrix and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and those well-intentioned homages unintentionally invited comparison — and scorn from some corners.

Nevertheless, he decided to go back and listen to LaFaro with the Bill Evans Trio. As a young bassist, Bromberg was always drawn more to the walking bass lines from the likes of Buster Williams, Rufus Reed or Cecil McBee. Yet listening again to those classic trio albums made him realize LaFaro had a greater effect on his playing than he realized. “His soloing and his lyricism, and his complete fearlessness … it really had an impact on me. That’s when I decided to do the record.” Bromberg enlisted L.A.-based pianist Tom Zink, who has played keyboards for a number of the bassist’s contemporary jazz records, but is “a Bill Evans freak,” and drummer Charles Ruggiero, a fixture in the New York jazz scene from the early ’90s until he relocated to Los Angeles in 2007.

LaFaro had recorded with Stan Getz, Booker Little, Hampton Hawes and Victor Feldman, among others, and he even took over for his friend and roommate Charlie Haden in Ornette Coleman’s band. But Bromberg’s homage focuses on the work LaFaro did with Evans, making this just as much of a tribute to the late, great pianist. Bromberg was just a promising young bassist in Tuscon when he met and hung out for a week with Evans and his last trio featuring drummer Joe LaBarbera and another rising star on bass, Marc Johnson. Seven months later, Johnson recommended Bromberg to Getz, who promptly hired him to go on tour. Johnson then relayed a message to Bromberg that Evans himself was inviting Bromberg to sit in with the trio during one of their weeks at the Village Vanguard. “The biggest musical regret of my life,” he laments. “I was 18 or 19, and too insecure to do it. I chickened out, and then we lost Bill not that long [after] … even if I played one song with Bill Evans it would have changed my life.”

Instead, Bromberg somehow found himself on the fast track to becoming a contemporary jazz star. “I didn’t think about it,” he says. “It just kind of happened. I’m just trying to be the best I could be, and whatever comes my way I’m going to jump into it, you know? That’s been the biggest blessing and also the biggest curse of my career.”

He elaborates: “I’ve recorded a lot of different kinds of jazz, a lot of different styles that all mean something to me. I put every ounce of who I am into everything that I do — my heart is in everything, but stylistically they are completely different. I could play you five different records back-to-back, [they] sound like five completely different artists. That’s the downside; people can’t go, boom — oh, that’s Brian Bromberg. They have no clue, and that hurt me a lot.”

One thing is becoming clear: Bromberg’s heart still resonates with the sounds of straightahead jazz. He mentions how much he enjoyed the Blindfold Test he did for DownBeat a few years ago. “It made me happy that I had enough awareness and acumen to really understand what I’m talking about,” he says, adding, “It made me sad [about] just how I feel really disconnected to the music that I love more than anything in the world, because my life has changed.”

Bromberg’s life has gone through even more changes the past few years. Despite his vaccinations and boosters, he contracted COVID, which triggered two other dormant viruses in his body: Epstein-Barr and mono. “I had no energy; I could not function. This recording was the first live jazz recording that I had done since I got sick and I didn’t know if I even physically could do it,” he explains. “I didn’t have the strength and the endurance and the stamina and the facility to go crazy, so I think it actually helped my playing for this record — it made it more musical, and it made me play more maturely.”

Severe illness, personal issues, relocating: perhaps these are the catalysts to move Bromberg in a direction he has always wanted to go. “Maybe now after all these years I’m finally becoming the musician that I wanted to be,” he says. “Part of me wants to reinvent myself, but in a really honest way. I would like to be inspired again, to have the music truly lead me, and that’s not easy when you get involved with other aspects of life, and you’ve been doing it for so long a certain way that you get stuck in your world.” Is it possible that finding himself alone on a ranch in the mountains far away from the world he has known is where Brian Bromberg ultimately finds his true artistic self?

“I’m in a place where I’m just gonna let whatever happens happen. I have no expectations, and if this record opens doors for me to do more of this music that I love, then what a blessing.” DB