Buzzart Enterprises Inc.

BuzzArt Enterprises, Inc., publishes the catalog of works of Buzzy Linhart, one of America’s finest songwriters. We will be presenting Buzzy’s prodigious body of work, beginning with a recently discovered trunk of unreleased quality recordings made by Buzzy during a period of intense creativity from roughly 1965 to 1979. Robert Shelton of the New York Times wrote in 1964 that Buzzy was the first American musician to successfully blend rock and Indian raga. And New York Times critic Mike Jahn wrote in 1971, “Buzz Linhart can be called one of those unusual cases. As a singer and guitarist, he is so different from the general run as to make you wonder if he really isn’t a brilliant fantasy that happened to work out…I suppose you would call it jazz-rock.” We have compiled an archive of Buzzy’s recordings over the years, selections from which we will stream on the ARCHIVE page of this web-site. We believe that the ARCHIVE will help to demonstrate the significant and almost forgotten role that Buzzy played in the history and evolution of American popular music.

In this effort, we are lucky that an outstanding filmmaker, Shelly Toscano, has made her splendid production of FAMOUS, THE BUZZY LINHART STORY, an inspired and insightful documentary movie on the life and times of this unique and brilliant songwriter and recording artist. In it Jack Douglas and Eddie Kramer attest to Buzzy’s immense talent. Jessie Colin Young tells that after hearing Buzzy sing GET TOGETHER at Café Au Go Go, he was so moved that he went backstage and asked Buzzy to teach it to him. Buzzy did so, and the rest is history. Moogy Klingman makes this observation: “You can’t underestimate Buzzy Linhart’s influence on the entire scene. One time I was playing with Buzzy at the Gaslight in like 1970 and Bob Dylan walked in, sat in the front row, stayed for the whole show…. You can hear it in Sebastian….” And so on.

We are also lucky that we have come to know of the talents and energy of Bill Black, an audio engineer par excellnce with a keen interest in audio restoration and the music of the 1960s and 1970s. Bill has digitized and in a number of cases restored for us these and other recordings, so that we now have an abundant archive that includes quality recordings of Buzzy’s work from 1965 to the present. We will be augmenting the ARCHIVE from time to time. Material available for licensing appears in the CATALOG section.

The business affairs of BuzzArt are managed by entertainment lawyer Art Berggren. He began his legal career with the San Francisco firm Cooley, Crowley, Gaither, Godward, Castro and Huddleson in 1963, and eventually founded his own law office in Santa Monica in 1980. He met Buzzy at a jam session in Venice, and eventually they formed Buzzart Enterprises, Inc., for the purpose of handling the administration of Buzzy’s catalog of works.

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