Dave Bruzza
Dave Bruzza is a guitarist, singer and songwriter from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who founded Greensky Bluegrass there in 2000 with the mandolinist Paul Hoffman and the banjo player Michael Arlen Bont. He has played on every Greensky record since, and away from the band he leads an electric rock group, Unsafe at Any Speed.
He grew up in Michigan as a drummer, playing in blues bands as a teenager and drawn above all to the Grateful Dead. He developed a taste for bluegrass in his teens, and a friend gave him a guitar to learn on. He had been playing it for only a few months when, at twenty, he began playing with Hoffman and Bont after the three came together at an open-mic night in Kalamazoo; they made their debut as a trio on Halloween night in 2000. Bruzza and Bont wanted to learn bluegrass, so they copied songs from records they liked and taped the Lonesome Moonlight Trio at the Cooper Cafe outside town to learn its songs. The dobro player Al Bates, briefly in the band, taught him how to take a lead, and he has said he still plays guitar like a drummer.
On Greensky’s first album, Less Than Supper (2004), he played guitar, sang and wrote “Old Glory” with Nate Haroldson. The bassist Mike Devol joined that year, the band won the Telluride Bluegrass Festival band contest in 2006, and the dobro player Anders Beck joined in 2007. Bruzza played guitar and percussion on Tuesday Letter (2006), guitar on the live Live at Bell’s, recorded at Bell’s in Kalamazoo, and guitar, drums, percussion and vocals on Five Interstates (2008), all on the band’s Big Blue Zoo label. His songs on later albums include “Room Without a Roof” and “Take Cover” on Shouted, Written Down & Quoted (2016) and “Streetlight” on Stress Dreams (2022). By 2020 he had moved to Colorado, and in 2022 he was living in Denver. Over Halloween weekend in 2025 the band marked its twenty-fifth anniversary with concerts in Kalamazoo.
Outside Greensky, he helped found the psychedelic folk-rock band Airborne or Aquatic? in Michigan in the early 2000s with Jake Robinson, Seth Bernard, Susan Fawcett and others from the Earthwork Music collective, and he has played on all of its albums. With Ian Gorman he made the duo album Harmony on the Fade (Earthwork Music, 2012), and he has guested on records such as Seth Bernard’s My Heart Is My Home. In 2018 he put together Dave Bruzza Unsafe at Any Speed for a short run of Midwest shows, an electric rock-and-roll band with no acoustic guitar on stage, and kept it going in Greensky’s time off. In May 2022 he released his first record under his own name, a seven-inch single of two surf-rock instrumentals he wrote and played himself, “Heart of Santa Cruz” and “Pearl Street Lounge.”
