Bazza

Back in the sweet hazy days of the summer of love, Bazza was launched. Ten years later, there were eighteen spinning reels of original music. Six hundred songs, sound on sound. Then the music died. Five years and a few hundred beautiful acrylic paintings later, he founded his new muse on Halloween night, Nice Lawn. They were flat-out western Michigan's most exciting garage band, with Bazza fronting the instrumental trio as the Begonia Bomb, the flower that explodes.

A sort of wired-up David Bowie combined with Gang Of Four. When the band broke up Bazza purchased a four track recorder and began what may well be the most prolific song writing career ever.

First he traveled to Boston, then to Portland, Oregon, on a stream of continuous recording adventures, while fronting electronic and alt.country folk bands. The staggering statistics are these: he has produced two hundred albums on cassette featuring three thousand original songs. He has released six studio CDs in the last seven years, working with legendary Northwest jazz, folk and country musicians. He has recently released two double CDs, Freezer, a folk opera based on the book Freezer Burn by East Texas Edgar Award winner Joe R. Lansdale and Bazza Goes Up North, twenty-nine poems set to music from the book by the same name, written by North American Bookdealers Exchange award winner Barton Johnson & his extended family. Bazza has been called Portland, Oregon's best kept secret by music critic S.P. Clarke (Two Louies), but hopefully not for long. His vast body of work is just too original and too good, and there's simply too much of it to keep it under wraps much longer. He's prolific out of necessity, not by choice - the muse has him in its jaws.