Denny Bruce is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 record producer

Record producer

A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...

 and artist manager. He was born in Lancaster, PA on October 4, 1944.

In the early 60s, he was a drummer for Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa

Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...

 but suffered a six-month illness with mononucleosis which cost him his job prior to the recording of Zappa's first album with The Mothers of Invention. He later became the drummer for the band Western Union.

His first management signee was Lisa Kindred

Lisa Kindred

Lisa Kindred is an American folk and blues singer.Kindred, born in Buffalo, was a figure in the Greenwich Village/Cambridge folk scene of the 1960s; she played with Bob Dylan and other folk singers, playing at the Cafe Wha?, Club 47, The Bitter End and other venues.Kindred's debut album, I Like It...

. He later became A&R

A&R

Artists and repertoire is the division of a record label that is responsible for talent scouting and overseeing the artistic development of recording artists. It also acts as a liaison between artists and the record label.- Finding talent :...

 consultant to the Blue Thumb Records

Blue Thumb Records

Blue Thumb Records was an American record label founded in 1968 by Bob Krasnow, along with former A&M Records executives Tommy LiPuma and Don Graham. Krasnow had been in the record business for a number of years, working as a promotion man for King Records and also working for Buddah/Kama Sutra...

 label, working with such artists as Ike and Tina Turner, Albert Collins

Albert Collins

Albert Collins was an American electric blues guitarist and singer whose recording career began in the 1960s in Houston and whose fame eventually took him to stages across the US, Europe, Japan and Australia...

, John Hiatt

John Hiatt

John Hiatt is an American rock guitarist, pianist, singer, and songwriter. He has played a variety of musical styles on his albums, including New Wave, blues and country. Hiatt has been nominated for several Grammy Awards - although he has never won- and has been awarded a variety of other...

, Albert Lee

Albert Lee

Albert William Lee, born 21 December 1943 in Leominster, Herefordshire, England, is an English guitarist known for his fingerstyle and hybrid picking technique. Lee has worked both in the studio and on tour with some of the most famous musicians which stretch through a very wide of genres...

 and Earl Hooker

Earl Hooker

Earl Hooker was an American Chicago blues guitarist, perhaps best known for his slide guitar playing. Considered a "musician's musician", Hooker performed with blues artists such as Sonny Boy Williamson II, Junior Wells, and John Lee Hooker as well as fronting his own bands...

. While working for Vanguard Records

Vanguard Records

Vanguard Records is a record label set up in 1950 by brothers Maynard and Seymour Solomon in New York. It started as a classical label, but is perhaps best known for its catalogue of recordings by a number of pivotal folk and blues artists from the 1960s; the Bach Guild was a subsidiary...

 he started producing John Fahey

John Fahey (musician)

John Fahey was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who pioneered the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been greatly influential and has been described as the foundation of American Primitivism, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the...

 and through him, he began his management and producer's relationship with Leo Kottke

Leo Kottke

Leo Kottke is an acoustic guitarist. He is widely known for his innovative fingerpicking style, which draws on influences from blues, jazz, and folk music, and his syncopated, polyphonic melodies...

. He produced all seven albums for Kottke on Capitol Records

Capitol Records

Capitol Records is a major United States based record label, formerly located in Los Angeles, but operating in New York City as part of Capitol Music Group. Its former headquarters building, the Capitol Tower, is a major landmark near the corner of Hollywood and Vine...

. He later joined with Chrysalis Records

Chrysalis Records

Chrysalis Records was a British record label that was created in 1969. The name was both a reference to the pupal stage of a butterfly and a combination of its founders names, Chris Wright and Terry Ellis...

 to purchase Fahey's Takoma Records

Takoma Records

Takoma Records was a small but influential record label founded by John Fahey in the late 1950s.. It was named after Fahey's hometown, the Washington, D.C. suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland.-History:...

 label. He signed The Fabulous Thunderbirds

The Fabulous Thunderbirds

The Fabulous Thunderbirds are an American, Grammy-nominated Blues rock band, formed in 1974.-Career:After performing for several years in the Austin, Texas blues scene, the band won a recording contract with Takoma/Chrysalis Records, and later on signed with Epic Records.Their first two albums,...

, T-Bone Burnett

T-Bone Burnett

Joseph Henry Burnett , widely known as T-Bone Burnett, is an American musician, songwriter, and soundtrack and record producer.He was a guitarist in Bob Dylan's band on the Rolling Thunder Revue...

 and George Winston

George Winston

George Winston is an American pianist who was born in Michigan, and grew up mainly in Miles City, Montana as well as Mississippi and Florida. He attended Stetson University in Deland, Florida and lives in Santa Cruz, California.-Background:...

 to the new Takoma label.

He served as pop music consultant to UCLA's Department of Fine Arts as well as at the Austin Performing Arts Center in Austin, Texas

Austin, Texas

Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...

.

Denny is now co-owner and CEO of Benchmark Recordings

Benchmark Recordings

Benchmark Recordings is a record label that was founded in 2002 by music industry veterans Bill Coben and Denny Bruce.The initial catalog included the first four albums by The Fabulous Thunderbirds, which were originally released in the late 1970s and early 1980s on the Takoma Records label and...

, which distributes albums by The Fabulous Thunderbirds

The Fabulous Thunderbirds

The Fabulous Thunderbirds are an American, Grammy-nominated Blues rock band, formed in 1974.-Career:After performing for several years in the Austin, Texas blues scene, the band won a recording contract with Takoma/Chrysalis Records, and later on signed with Epic Records.Their first two albums,...

 and Mike Bloomfield

Mike Bloomfield

Michael Bernard "Mike" Bloomfield was an American musician, guitarist, and composer, born in Chicago, Illinois, who became one of the first popular music superstars of the 1960s to earn his reputation almost entirely on his instrumental prowess, since he rarely sang before 1969–70...

.

External links

• [ Allmusic biography]