For Brian Bromberg, music has always been a language of movement, discovery and expression. On Awakening, his 30th album as a leader, it becomes something even more personal: a record of survival, healing and renewed purpose.
The Grammy-nominated bassist will release Awakening on October 9, 2026, through Shanachie Entertainment, bringing together 13 original compositions and an extraordinary circle of collaborators, including Dave Koz, Paul Brown, Euge Groove, Everette Harp, David Benoit, Marion Meadows and Michael Paulo. The album finds Bromberg drawing on four decades of musical experience while opening a window into a profoundly difficult chapter of his life.
“Awakening is deeply personal to me; I think the emotions within the music are universal,” Bromberg says. “No matter who we are, what we look like, or where we come from…we all experience joy and loss, love and pain, hope and change.”
That universality is at the heart of the project. Bromberg describes Awakening as the musical result of emerging from a terribly painful period and rediscovering his sense of energy, confidence and ownership over his life. The music, he says, came to him during a period when his world had been dramatically altered.
Over four days in December 2023, Bromberg experienced a series of events that would reshape his life. His relationship with his then-fiancée ended, forcing him to leave his home in Ojai, California, along with his recording studio and the animals he considered family. At the same time, he was undergoing cataract surgery and making repeated trips to Santa Barbara for treatment and follow-up care.
Then came a devastating accident. While administering prescribed eye drops in an unfamiliar, dimly lit environment, Bromberg lost his balance and fell onto a concrete floor, breaking his back and severely injuring the fingers of his right hand.
For a bassist, the physical consequences could hardly have been more consequential. Emotionally, he was also dealing with separation, uncertainty, loss and the sudden disappearance of the life he had known.
Yet from that upheaval came music.
“I still ask myself: Where did these melodies come from?” Bromberg recalls. “How did so many joyous melodies come out of so much pain?”
The answer, perhaps, is embedded in the character of Awakening itself. The album refuses to remain in one emotional place. It moves between exuberance and melancholy, funk and balladry, contemporary jazz and straight-ahead sensibilities. Its melodies are often immediately accessible, but beneath the grooves is the story of an artist processing change and finding his way forward.
Bromberg compares the experience to the formation of diamonds and crystals, which emerge from intense pressure and heat. For him, the trials of those months became part of a process of transformation.
“There truly has been an awakening,” he says. “This music saved me. I feel like the music came to me, that it was given to me and entrusted to me to honor it.”
That sense of gratitude extends to the musicians surrounding him on the album. Bromberg has long embraced collaboration, and Awakening continues that tradition with a lineup of distinctive voices. Paul Brown co-produced the project with Bromberg, while saxophonists Dave Koz, Euge Groove, Everette Harp, Marion Meadows and Michael Paulo each bring their own personalities to the music. Pianist David Benoit also joins the project.
For Bromberg, the chemistry matters. “I’ve always tried to surround myself with the best of the best,” he says. “It’s incredibly inspiring to me. Every one of them has such a strong and recognizable voice on their instrument, and they bring that unique voice to my music.”
The album also provides a showcase for Bromberg's remarkable command of the bass as a lead instrument. He moves among a Kiesel B2 five-string bass, a Kiesel B2 four-string tenor bass and a hollow-body piccolo bass, using different registers and tunings to expand the instrument's musical vocabulary. On the record's guitar-like melodies and solos, he plays piccolo bass tuned an octave and a fourth above conventional bass tuning.
That versatility has defined much of Bromberg's career. Across roughly 40 years of recording, he has moved comfortably between musical worlds, collaborating with artists ranging from Herbie Hancock, Dizzy Gillespie and Andrea Bocelli to Sarah Vaughan, Lalo Schifrin and Kenny Barron. He has appeared on more than 150 recordings and now adds another milestone to an already expansive discography.
Awakening may be his most direct meeting point between technical mastery and emotional transparency.
“I call these songs ‘melodies of life,’” Bromberg says. “Somehow everything I was going through during that period found its way into the music. I want people to feel who I am and what I was going through when this music was written and recorded.”
The journey begins with “Forever Friends,” a buoyant, groove-driven opener written with Jeff Smith, before moving through the summery optimism of “California Summer” and the free-spirited “The Dancer.” The first single, “Apparently Not!,” featuring Everette Harp, brings a gritty funk edge and stop-time blues lines, while “The Dance We Never Had,” featuring Dave Koz, turns inward with a wistful meditation on the wedding dance that never happened.
Elsewhere, “Cherry Blossom” settles into a warm, soulful groove, while the title track brings a festive African influence and allows Bromberg to move between three different basses. “Ojai,” featuring Paul Brown, carries a more reflective atmosphere, with Bromberg's piccolo bass helping create the track's distinctive sound.
The emotional range continues through “Candlelight,” featuring Michael Paulo; “Salutations,” with Marion Meadows; and “What Could Have Been,” a particularly poignant collaboration with David Benoit. On the latter, Bromberg and Benoit explore the ache of looking back while still moving forward.
There is also room for pure musical exuberance. “Just Be Boppin’ Around” delivers a bottom-heavy groove and spirited interplay between Bromberg and Marion Meadows, while the closing track, “So in Love, So Alone,” brings the album home with an R&B-inflected pulse and a final display of Bromberg's agility.
For Shanachie Entertainment Vice President of Jazz A&R Danny Weiss, Bromberg's ability to combine virtuosity with accessibility is central to his appeal. Bromberg, Weiss notes, can operate at the highest levels of jazz while communicating with a broad audience.
That balance is especially evident on Awakening. Bromberg describes it as perhaps his most format-friendly album while emphasizing that musical integrity remains at its core. It is contemporary without abandoning musicianship, melodic without sacrificing improvisation, and deeply personal without becoming inaccessible.
Ultimately, Awakening is less about leaving pain behind than transforming it into something meaningful. Bromberg does not disguise the circumstances that inspired the music. Instead, he allows joy, grief, nostalgia, gratitude and hope to coexist.
His philosophy is simple: “Good enough is never good enough. Always strive to be the best you can be in music and in your life.”
After decades spent exploring what the bass can do, Bromberg has arrived at another discovery: sometimes the most powerful music comes from allowing life itself to become the instrument.
“Awakening is deeply personal to me,” he says, “but I think the emotions within the music are universal.”
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