The cellist Christopher Hoffman has already garnered a unique reputation as a composer, bandleader and accompanist (not to mention as a filmmaker who has directed several shorts, music videos and behind the scenes featurettes while he arranged a multi-tracked cello rendition of Gustav Mahler’s now famous Piano Quartet in A Minor for Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller Shutter Island in 2010).
Just as likely to cite the influence of MF Doom or electric-period Miles Davis as his cello forebears Abdul Wadud and Hank Roberts or contemporaries like Tomeka Reid and Okkyung Lee, for more than a decade he has been part of Henry Threadgill’s experimental chamber ensemble Zooid, whose complex but dynamic use of harmony and counterpoint derives from Threadgill’s own discrete system of intervals. In quite another context he has played alongside James Brandon Lewis as part of his Red Lily Quintet, contributing to the folkish airs of Jesup Wagon, a tribute to the agricultural scientist George Washington Carver, and the spiritual yearning of For Mahalia, With Love which Lewis described as a three-way conversation between the gospel icon Mahalia Jackson, his grandmother and himself.
Hoffman was also part of Lewis’s trio while he has collaborated on several occasions with Tony Malaby, Anna Webber and Kenny Warren, for instance on the latter’s impish and deviant 2024 album Sweet World. Outside of a jazz context, he has performed with Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithful and Ryan Adams. His own compositions might reckon with hip hop beats or the angularity and distortion of rock music, and can prove fragmentary or elliptical even where they do not amount to a series of vignettes, stopping on a dime and containing numerous layers while maintaining a narrative bent.
Asp Nimbus with Bryan Carrott, Rashaan Carter and Craig Weinrib reckoned with the catalogue of the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson as well as some of Threadgill’s past work while Vision is the Identity was more of an electronic album, the core trio of Hoffman, Frank LoCrasto and Bill Campbell joined for featured spots by Threadgill, Webber, Alfredo ColĆ³n and Ryan Scott. Both of these projects were highly acclaimed and wound up on the year-end lists of prominent critics.
Nor does Hoffman stay inside the lines when it comes to his album art, with Asp Nimbus bearing a kind of American traditional tattoo of a bare-breasted woman coiled about by a red serpent while for Vision is the Identity the skeletal eyes of the grim reaper stared back at us through the reflection in their scythe (both covers were designed by the Out Of Your Head Records in-house artist TJ Huff, whose work has memorably adorned albums by Nick Dunston, Adam O’Farrill and the Hemphill Stringtet).
Still the new record by Hoffman is his debut solo album, which follows a curious journey of discovery after he and his family moved out of the city and began living in the former home of Rex Brasher, a self-taught painter who created more than 1,200 watercolours of North American birds.
Vagabonding across the continental states by rail and foot, often walking for days on end before judiciously navigating forests and swamps, losing his money on the horses and having to take up odd jobs – working briefly as a lithographer or as a boat hand on either coast – in 1912 the artist purchased a plot of land on the border between Amenia in Dutchess County, New York and Kent in Litchfield County, Connecticut, dubbing the 116 wooded acres the Chickadee Valley. Painting by daylight, it was here in 1924 that Brasher completed his twelve-volume opus Birds and Trees of North America and by chance, looking for a change of scenery after years in Brooklyn, it was here that Hoffman and his family set up.
The cellist suggests that he had been edging towards a solo album at the same time as he was surreptitiously putting the process on hold. As the first renter of Rex’s old home outside of the Brasher family, he began to take an interest in the artist’s work, bought a two-volume edition of Birds and Trees of North America and with support from the Rex Brasher Association, performed an original composition at a Rex Brasher symposium in 2023 just a few months after moving into the old homestead. In an interview with the local newspaper The Lakeville Journal, he says that became inspired by Brasher’s devotion and thought to himself ‘This guy was working so hard [. . .] it was like, “Alright, Chris, get it together. Make the solo record you’re afraid to make”‘.
Playing acoustic and electric cello, the first composition on REX offers a kind of aching Americana, at once purposeful and picturesque as Hoffman sets his short stabbing bows and more winding arco passages beneath graceful drags and winsome passages which, one imagines, reflect something of Brasher and his life’s work. ‘Snow Owls’ gets into the bones and while Hoffman no doubt drew across his album from the recorded history of solo cello music, including Life Cycle by Dave Holland and the archetypal By Myself by Abdul Wadud, this piece as it progresses crested by Hoffman’s short, blazing harmonies calls to mind ‘In the Light of a Miracle’ by Arthur Russell, the signature song of the cellist and outsider artist.
Hoffman makes extensive use of loop and effects pedals, with his cello sometimes sounding like a double bass or even a Wurlitzer organ with just the requisite amount of fairground kitsch. ‘Buffalo Mountain’ is somehow squelchier and brassier, though Hoffman pictures the elevation ‘at the top of the long, winding gravel road to Brasher’s house’ and captures the ascent of his subsequent hikes to its peak, while ‘The Babbling’ bears some of the same characteristics but sounds more rustic at first, a kind of passerby who flits through a community while keeping mostly to oneself. Then the song’s winding melodies begin to multiply without stratifying, like ribbons weaving the wind on a brief yet memorable two minute and 22 second composition which teasingly and tormentingly ends much too soon.
Over these first few songs, REX sounds like a series of journeys and stops, like Brasher making the long trek to a suitable birdwatching location then lying in wait or taking in the landscape, or like both artists in their separate ways engaging in the compositional process, making a flurry of quick decisions and adding shape and texture to their work then marking some break point or showing pleasure in the result. Hoffman writes that his record:
reflects the solitude and intensity that shaped both Brasher’s vision and my own process. REX is not a portrait, but an echo – of a person, a place, and a way of seeing the world.
‘Heavy’ turns Hoffman’s cello into an electric bass, as his plucks and licks suggest a little bit of funk, a little bit of acid jazz and a little bit of progressive rock. ‘Saboteur’ is scuzzier still, the bowed motifs of his cello tumbling through the distorted murk on a track that sounds wilful or at least intentional, somehow medieval and doggedly perverse. Both of these tracks – ‘Heavy’ and ‘Saboteur’ – sound markedly different on film where ‘Saboteur’ is given an acoustic treatment while ‘Heavy’ proves more scorching and scintillating as Hoffman gnaws away at the edge of a string. The music videos for these two compositions also offer a useful insight into Hoffman’s processes, foregrounding his pizzicato and making the loops more transparent, with the video for ‘Heavy’ showing him engage in some live processing as the performance reaches a screeching or caterwauling, almost skin-flaying climax.
The rest of the album proceeds in this manner even as it seems to grow more narratively complex, with Hoffman layering staggered drones and looping figures of bowed or plucked cello underneath keen and poignant melodic lines or more rasping textures. On the relatively longform ‘Spindrift’ his aching bows hang above brackish drones and noodling harmonics before the more hurried interplay towards the end of the piece suggests the titular spume and spray, with Hoffman finally clanging away at the hull of his vessel. The title tune ‘Rex’ meanwhile links a couple of pizzicato passages before Hoffman’s bow picks up the tempo, at once leisurely or jaunty before ultimately proving one of the album’s most driving threads.
‘Pal’ has more of a down-home quality which reminds me of Animal Collective on Campfire Songs or Sung Tongs. The cellist sets a gently loping figure beneath bright but unvarnished plucks, which eventually congeal into a mass of bleeps as though a spaceship was just beginning to ascend above the Chickadee Valley’s many hushed acres.
REX sometimes feels in the best way like a bit of a shaggy dog story. ‘All Together’ features a coiled but ambling descent which steadily becomes more tingling and spectral. On the suggestive ‘Resting Place’ our shabby mutt lights upon a glistening bone. ‘Swallowtail Kite’ has a subtle Latin flavour, even sounding a bit like ranchera or cumbia as its blocky rhythms begin to flow. And on ‘Steer Home’ a pastoral vision is cut up by shards of distortion, as Hoffman trundles into the night like a handcar jigging down so many moonlit railroad tracks before the cellist upsets the apple cart so to speak, one more time with one last clanking and thudding, pealing and declamatory caw or surge.
