A National Obsession : Bob Brozman Brings His Guitar Devotion and Old-Time Folk Styles to Anaheim Tonight

Even the scraggliest-looking guitar aces have one thing in common with the famous bruisers of the pro sports world: They get paid for endorsing the stuff they use in their profession.

For Michael Jordan, it’s sneakers. For Steve Vai or Eddie Van Halen, it’s the latest in six-string technology.

Bob Brozman is one expert guitar player whose prospects for such commercial spinoffs would seem limited. Brozman is almost religious in his devotion to one make of instrument: the National brand of metal-bodied acoustic guitars. But no manufacturer’s largess will be coming his way. The National String Instrument Co. has been out of business since 1941.

Even so, being a National devotee for some 20 years has proven worthwhile for Brozman, who will bring an array of National instruments (including two guitars, a mandolin and a ukulele) with him for a show tonight at the Anaheim Cultural Arts Center.

Brozman, 37, has built a steady career on the folk-music circuit by playing old-time songs and styles that date from the 1920s to the mid-’30s, the period when Los Angeles-based National was in its prime. Playing with a metal slide bar, Brozman can massage long-lingering, wide-bending quavers or deft and hefty staccato bursts out of his Nationals, which were designed to project more presence and sound power than a player could muster on a conventional wooden acoustic guitar. When the electric guitar came into its own, the National quickly turned into an antique.

Speaking over the phone recently from his home near Santa Cruz, Brozman said that to his ears, musical antiquity is synonymous with musical vibrancy. His repertoire is a blend of blues, jazz, calypso music and traditional Hawaiian strains. If a style emerged after 1935 or so, it’s too callow for Brozman’s taste. He’ll play original compositions as well as oldies, but they are rooted in his old-time sources.

Sticking to music from the ‘20s and ‘30s “has been my policy for over 20 years,” Brozman said. “With the rise of radio and other forms of giant media, the sincerity factor just plummets. In the 1920s, record companies didn’t know what would sell. Consequently, they would record anything, and a lot of interesting stuff went down.”

The trick for the musical conservator is to make old stuff sound fresh. Brozman, who has released four albums on the Rounder and Kicking Mule labels, does that with a commanding guitar technique and a good measure of levity, as well as a penchant for mixing and matching old styles in innovative combinations.

“When you do old music for a modern audience, you have to make it accessible. What I do is present it with a lot of energy and humor. I have kind of a nutty professorly type thing, saying ridiculous things, poking fun at (music) industry legends,” Brozman said.

Brozman’s old-time repertoire puts him in the same bailiwick as the better-known Leon Redbone, but Brozman sounded more than a bit jaundiced when the subject of old-time music’s most telegenic exponent came up.

“I have a sort of persona, but it’s not as developed as (Redbone’s) is,” Brozman said. “He’s to the point where he can pick up his pinky and raise his drink, and people will laugh.” Brozman said he identifies more with Taj Mahal’s high-energy approach to old material than Redbone’s laid-back style. “Someone like Taj Mahal leaves people going home feeling warm and satisfied. That’s what I want to do.”

Brozman’s journey through the musical past began when he was in his teens.

“The first National I ever saw was on a Johnny Winter album,” he said. “I found out what his sources were and found they were so much better than what he was doing--and, for that matter, (better than) what I am doing.”

Brozman, who grew up in New York, didn’t get an authentic National guitar of his own until he was 18 years old. He couldn’t afford to buy the National he found in a Manhattan instrument shop, and the store management refused to set it aside for him until he had the money. For two weeks, while he got together the money by putting his other guitars on sale, Brozman went to the store each day, grabbed that National and spent the entire business day playing it in a corner of the shop so that nobody else would be able to buy it.

Nationals “just have a depth and a cutting power and a sort of profundity to the sound that’s hard to describe,” Brozman said. “There’s just no other acoustic instrument that delivers that response.”

Brozman’s National helped put him through college at Washington University in St. Louis, where he raised money by playing the blues, then studied the sources of the blues as an ethnomusicology major.

His fascination with National guitars led him to another major influence: Hawaiian music. A collection of slide-guitar music Brozman bought because its cover depicted a National included several tracks by Sol Hoopii, a leading, jazz-influenced Hawaiian player, and Brozman immediately became a collector and player of island music.

A few years ago, he hooked up with the Tau Moe Family, a Hawaiian group headed by a husband and wife who had made one obscure album in the 1920s, then spent 60 years touring the world. The album that Brozman made with them, “Remembering the Songs of Our Youth,” is a lower-profile equivalent of the culture-jumping excursions that such pop stars as David Byrne, Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel have undertaken. It features yodeling lead vocals that recall early Appalachian recordings from the 1920s, and harmony currents that bear an uncanny resemblance to the sound of Simon’s South African collaborators, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. (Simon, you may recall, made his nod to the object of Brozman’s affection in the title song from “Graceland,” which begins: “The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar. . . . “)

On the three albums Brozman has released on his own, the Hawaiian strands crop up in a repertoire that includes straight blues, jumping jazz songs, calypsos and even a touch of Western swing. New Age piano star George Winston is one of Brozman’s regular backing players. According to Brozman, Winston, who also lives in Santa Cruz, plays those sessions for free because they give him a chance to indulge his love for stride-blues piano.

Brozman’s next release will be an all-blues recording for the European market, to be followed by a project incorporating West African sources along with his other influences.

When he comes to Anaheim, Brozman won’t only be bringing his National guitars, but the finished manuscript for a book about the National guitar. After more than three years’ work, Brozman said, he is ready to submit his book, “The History of the National Guitar,” to his Anaheim-based publisher, Centerstream Publications.

The book arrives at a time when interest in the National guitar is surging, Brozman said. For that, he credits British rocker Mark Knopfler, who has turned the National into something of an icon. The cover of Dire Straits’ hugely successful 1985 album, “Brothers in Arms,” depicts a radiantly shining National guitar suspended in the heavens, as if it were some harbinger of divine grace. Nationals were also the cover motif for Knopfler’s recent album with the Notting Hillbillies.

Nationals have turned into prized antiques--which might be better for Brozman than any endorsement deal. According to Brozman, the guitars now sell for $2,000 or more.

“That has just enabled me to have a nice retirement, because I started collecting Nationals a long time ago,” he said. “I was getting ‘em in garage sales when you could buy ‘em for $100. I just sold one to a stockbroker for $10,000. I thank Mark Knopfler for that.”

Bob Brozman plays tonight at 8 at the Anaheim Cultural Arts Center, 931 N. Harbor Boulevard, as part of “The Living Tradition” folk series. Admission: $8 ; free for children under 12 accompanied by a parent. A jam session will follow the concert. Information: (714) 638-1466 or (714) 535-3059.