Eric Hofbauer

Eric Hofbauer has been an integral member of Boston’s jazz scene as a musician, bandleader, organizer and educator for the past 35 years. He has performed and recorded alongside such notable collaborators as Han Bennink, Roy Campbell, Jr., John Tchicai, Garrison Fewell, Noah Preminger, Cecil McBee, George Garzone, Sean Jones, John Fedchock, and Matt Wilson.

Hofbauer, recognized in the 2024,2022, 2019 and 2017 DownBeat Critics’ Poll for Rising Star – Guitar, is perhaps best known for his solo guitar work featured in a trilogy of solo guitar recordings (American Vanity, American Fear and American Grace). The most recent large-scale endeavor by Hofbauer is a five-part series of original suites, each named after one of the elements (water, fire, wood, metal, and earth) featured in the Chinese philosophical construct known as Wu Xing.

For the past 10 years, his primary ensemble has been the Eric Hofbauer Quintet, which performs Hofbauer’s jazz arrangements of groundbreaking 20th century pieces which he describes as “prehistoric jazz.” These arrangements celebrate the common ground between modern jazz and the works of Stravinsky, Messiaen, Ellington, and Ives by using the shared rhythmic and harmonic concepts of the 20th-century modernists as a bridge to postmodern jazz improvisation.

Hofbauer is the chair of the Jazz and Contemporary Music Deptartment at Longy School of Music of Bard College, where he teaches jazz theory, chamber ensembles, solo repertoire class, style and analysis, improvised film scoring, and guitar/improvisation/composition lessons. In 2009, he was honored with the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Music Composition.