Lazer Lloyd

One of the best-known blues musicians in Israel, American singer/songwriter/guitarist Lazer Lloyd (born Lloyd Paul Blumen) carved a career for himself by promoting the blues genre in the Middle East, where it was lesser known than at home. A soulful singer and guitarist, he was born in New York and raised in Madison, Connecticut on blues, folk, rock, and jazz by a musician father, having access to his extensive record collection. Eventually developing a style that incorporated all of these genre influences into his emotive blues, he was playing lead guitar along the East Coast with his band Legacy by age 15. He started singing and writing songs while a music major at Skidmore College in upstate New York, where he studied under the tutelage of musicians including jazz bassist Milt Hinton and Blood, Sweat & Tears' Randy Brecker. After graduating, he formed the Last Mavericks and had a brief dalliance with Atlantic Records, who planned to take him to Nashville. Instead, he was moved to accept an invitation by singer/songwriter Shlomo Carlebach (aka Reb Schlomo) to go to Israel after they played a show together in Manhattan. Arriving in his adopted country in 1994, he joined the psychedelic jam band Reva L'Sheva (under his Hebrew name Eliezer Blumen) and spent the next ten years touring and recording with them until he self-released his solo debut album, the folk-rock-influenced Higher Ground, in 2004. He then established the roots rock trio Yood, which issued two albums, 2007's Passin' Over and 2008's Real People, and toured in Israel and the U.S. In 2011 he released the acoustic Lazer Lloyd Unplugged, Blues in Tel Aviv, and a collection of Hebrew songs titled Haneshama. A collaboration with David Orbach titled King of Blues and the solo My Own Blues followed in 2012. The next year, Blues Leaf Records issued an acoustic Lazer Lloyd album, Lost on the Highway, and the bluesman continued to tour Israel and North America under his own name. In the summer of 2015, he released a self-titled electric album on his own Chicago-based Lots of Love Record label.