Rich Bozza has been creating music for over 50 years, and will be continuing right up until the moment of his death, at which point he will likely invite the Grim Reaper to jam.

But it all started in a Brooklyn basement in 1972, as a young Rich watched his friend Billy’s older brothers practice guitar. On that day, Rich decided he was going to learn to play guitar, too – and so a lifelong obsession with all things musical was born. Billy’s brothers introduced Rich to their guitar teacher, and he spent a few years building his skills with rock licks before switching to acoustic guitar to take up blues and ragtime picking, including about a half dozen lessons from a student of Rev. Gary Davis himself.

By the ’80s, Rich was working and performing with a number of different musical groups as a bassist, guitarist, and producer. He watched with excitement as MIDI technology & computer-based recording first hit the scene and was an early adopter of the rapidly-evolving tech, learning to play the keyboard and then purchasing his first computer (a Commodore 64) in 1986.

This technological advancement was exactly what Rich had been waiting for since he was a teenager – ever since he started playing music, he wanted to be the whole band. He always had the whole thing playing in his head for whatever he wrote, and would then have to figure out how to convey it to the rest of the band. Once he had the tech to make it all happen himself, composing and producing began to slowly consume Rich’s musical focus, until by the early ’90s he had stopped performing in favor of making music entirely on his own. 

Meanwhile, as he watched this once-emerging genre of music production become a real force in the industry, Rich started demoing some early game music (and spent a touch too much time & money swapping out gear). Sometime around ’95 there was a brief “Jazz Scare” when Rich became obsessed with fingerstyle jazz guitar, taking even more lessons. Thankfully, the only lasting consequence of this escapade was the purchase of a particularly pretty red guitar.

Rich moved out of Brooklyn for the first time in 2005, hopping one state and one city over to Philadelphia. Soon after arrival he took a job as a music producer on a film, which six months later was completed, shelved, and never released. Looking at all the music he wrote that wound up unused, Rich decided he was going to make the best of it, edited them down, and uploaded them to some production music sites.

The following decade saw Rich continue his search for musical knowledge, moving carefully from genre to genre as he researched and explored each one. He also expanded his repertoire of production music and experimented with a wide variety of musical themes. This period of exploration & experimentation culminated in the self-produced 2016 release of his first solo recording, Pop Moderne, Volume 1.

After completing his first album, it was time to continue his musical exploration. This time Rich branched out into orchestral and world musics over the following decade, combining these newfound skills and influences with his existing love of progressive rock and electro-acoustic soundscapes to develop his latest work, Our Own Little World.

And that brings us back to today. He plans to take a few keyboard lessons to further his ability, adding even more formal training to his ever-expanding repertoire, and will likely continue to learn new instruments as he goes both on his own and via formal instruction. Because despite having completed two full albums, hundreds of production tracks and singles, produced music for a film, explored dozens of genres, performed with multiple bands, and so much more over the years, Rich is still nowhere near finished with his quest to appreciate everything the music of our world has to offer.