Craft And Art: Christopher Hoffman’s ‘REX’ At The Treelawn

When the book is closed on the year’s most satisfying recordings, don’t be surprised to find among the big-budget productions, glossy all-star tributes and high-profile collabs, an intimately scaled solo cello recording on the tiny Out Of Your Head Records label. It’s called REX and its creator Christopher Hoffman will bring the music he wrote for it to a solo concert at The Treelawn Social Club Wednesday evening.

The recording has the affect of a household craft project, which is almost literally true in this case; the 13 compositions of REX, were recorded, mixed and mastered in the home where Hoffman lived. But the notion of craft was more than an incidental detail of the project’s creation. Craft—how it is honed and where it is practiced–might be REX’s animating idea.

Hoffman lived in a home that once belonged to Rex Brasher, a self-taught artist who painted every bird species in North America from life. Brasher was both prolific and meticulous. Not satisfied with the color printing technology available in the 1930s, Brasher insisted on painting by hand the 88,200 color illustrations for 100 sets of his encyclopedic,12-volume “Birds and Trees of North America.”

Wandering the 116-acre estate, Hoffman was moved to create what he called in notes for the recording, “not a portrait, but an echo—of a person, a place, and a way of seeing the world—” a way of seeing that in its specificity, generosity and close observation, mirrored Hoffman’s own.

The compositions offer resonances of the places where the painter worked, the birds that were the subject of the more than 1,200 watercolors he created, and touching portraits of Brasher’s beloved wife Marie and his dog Pal. It’s an extraordinarily intimate evocation of a man who died some 18 years before Hoffman, who turned 48 last Friday, was born in Chicago.

Hoffman has impressive credits in American vernacular music and with bands such as Iron & Wine, but it was his association with fellow Chicagoan Henry Threadgill’s Zooid ensemble that brought the cellist to the attention of The Treelawn’s Eric Hanson.

“Threadgill has been a personal hero of mine since I was in college and discovered his music,” Hanson wrote in an email. “Christopher had only the greatest things to say about his experience with him. So many things jumped out at me that were of interest in what Christopher does. Being an improvising cellist to start with of course, but also the range and depth of his associations in the music world is both unusual and impressive.”

Christopher Hoffman: REX, July 1, The Treelawn Social Club, 15335 Waterloo Rd., Cleveland. Tickets $12, available here.

REX is available from Bandcamp at this link.

---

For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.