Kelseyville >> For a large part of his life, Dave Broida struggled with lupus and the resulting kidney failure and dialysis from the disease. He continues the fight, every day. Only three things helped him through his roughest time: his wife, Elizabeth, his bandmate, Sue Hill, and his music.
“Music was one of my most powerful medicines,” Broida said. “I think the music was the biggest driving force in dealing with health issues.”
For three decades Broida has been a practicing harmonica player. He’s been heading his own band for 15 years, Dave Broida’s Blues Farm, and teaching workshops to make a living. Through his sickest time, Broida continued to teach and play his harmonica, not in spite of the energy required to make music, but because of it. “The thing about playing harmonica is, it’s very invigorating. To get it to sound you have to breathe,” he said. “Oxygenating your body is very helpful to keep it alive when you’re fighting other things.”
He compared playing the instrument to a runner’s high. “It kind of brings out those natural opiates in the brain, those endorphins that are very healing to the body,” Broida explained.
But music alone couldn’t get him through everything. Four and a half years ago when Broida was in kidney failure, Hill, the Blues Farm bassist, donated one of her kidneys. It’s clear Hill is much more than just a band mate — she’s a dear friend to Broida.
The two met 20 years ago at Broida’s yard sale at his home in Middletown. Hill lived up the road from Broida, and came to check out the sale, when the two got to talking and bonded over their love of the blues. Because they were both in the beginnings of learning their instruments — Broida on harmonica and Hill on bass — they decided to get together and play. One thing lead to another and before they knew it, Dave Broida’s Blues Farm was officially a thing.
Although the lineup has changed over the years, Hill has been a constant in the blues group. Today’s band features Broida on vocals and harmonica, Hill on bass, Steve DuBois on drums, “Mojo” Larry Platz on guitar and Patrick Fitzgerald on the keyboard.
They perform at Smiling Dogs Ranch near Kelseyville this evening for the winery’s Hump Day Howler.
Broida is a self-taught harmonica player and the way he tells it, he quite literally picked up the instrument one day and decided to play. “I just stuck it in my mouth and carried it around with me everywhere,” he said. “I just listened to a lot of blues music. Like most harmonica players, you tried to copy what you hear and figure it out by ear. Most harmonica players don’t learn by reading music.”
A harmonica player’s greatest learning tool isn’t playing, but listening. “We try to listen to the greats and the almost-greats. We try to listen to anyone who’s better than us and borrow, learn a little bit from them and incorporate it into our own playing style,” Broida said. “And it’s a never ending learning process.”
As a blues musician, learning the harmonica was a logical choice, as it is “the most powerful instrument in the blues,” Broida said. But there was more to it than that. More than it’s prominence in the blues, Broida favors the instrument for the emphasis it places on breathing. “It’s very enlivening, very life supporting,” he explained. “It’s very physical, very earthy, very emotive. It’s very akin to the human voice in the range that it has a lot of tonal emotion.”
The blues have always been at the center of Broida’s musical world. He dabbles in pop, folk and other styles for his own personal enjoyment, but he’s only ever performed the one genre, drawn in by the its emotional sensibility. “It’s so in the here and now. You’re not playing a song note for note like classical music. It’s very spontaneous. You’re trying to translate your emotions through the music,” he explained. “The magic is happening or it’s not. You can’t fake it.”
Perhaps it’s due to that desire for spontaneity that Dave Broida’s Blues Farm doesn’t rehearse. The five band members meet up a few times a month for each performance, and that’s about it. As a result, their unexpected, improvisational shows always keeps things interesting. “We never do the same song the same way twice,” Broida explained. “But we have a pretty good feel for each other. There’s a certain magic that can happen, or not, which makes it exciting.”
While Broida plays the harmonica in the group, he’s also a guitar player and the band’s songwriter. He crafts all their original material on the six-stringed instrument. He finds inspiration in many aspects of life and writes songs “celebrating love, consoling pain and rising above struggle.” He’s certainly had a good deal of experience with all three.
Of course, Dave Broida’s Blues Farm doesn’t forget about the classic blues covers. “We try and make them our own,” Broida said. “We don’t steal them, we borrow them.”
Broida’s musical influences haven’t changed much over the past 30 or so years. When he first began playing he looked up to Paul Butterfield, Little Walter, Sonny Terry, RJ Mischo and Ukiah musician Mark Ford. Even today, those five musicians are still the biggest influences at the core of Broida’s music.
There are a number of words Broida would use to describe the Blues Farm’s sound: funky, sweaty, steamy and smoky are just a few. To top it off, he called their style “jumping Chicago blues.” But what sets them apart from other blues bands, Broida said, are their live performances. “I do a lot of observing what’s going on with the crowd. I try to work the crowd quite a bit,” he explained. “I try to make a personal connection with people there, not just playing to a wall of faces. I try to tell a story within the songs, how it might relate to their life or my life.”
Broida loves how a live performance gives him a chance to connect with the audience on a personal level and, hopefully, brighten their day. He hopes he succeeds in “waking them [the audience] up, making them feel alive, making them feel I can be their friend, at least for that evening,” Broida said.
Dave Broida’s Blues Farm performs at Smiling Dogs Ranch in Kelseyville this evening at 5 p.m. Tickets are $10. RSVP only, so call 279-2762 for reservations. Smiling Dogs Ranch recommends bringing lawn chairs and a picnic.
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
