Juno-winning Florian Hoefner Trio brings modern jazz to BlueShore at CapU, April 18

Ensemble will perform songs off of acclaimed album Desert Bloom

By Gail johnson

Florian Hoefner Trio. Photo by Bo Huang

BlueShore at CapU presents the Florian Hoefner Trio on April 18 from 8 to 10 pm as part of its CapU Jazz Series

THE 2023 JUNO Award for best jazz album by a group, for Desert Bloom, wasn’t the first national recognition for the Florian Hoefner Trio. Besides other nods, the ensemble was also nominated for a Juno for its debut album, First Spring.

Hoefner—a pianist-composer who was born and raised in Bavaria, trained in New York City, and now lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland—has teamed up with Toronto’s Andrew Downing on bass and Nick Fraser on drums. Downing plays primarily in Canada’s creative jazz scene but also performs classical chamber music, improvised music, folk and roots music, and world music. He’s a two-time Juno winner in his own right (one of which was with Vancouver’s Zubot and Dawson). Fraser has been an active presence in the country’s new jazz and improvised music community for over two decades and has performed with the likes of Tony Malaby, Kris Davis, Roscoe Mitchell, Marilyn Crispell, and Anthony Braxton.

Where the trio’s First Spring features Hoefner’s arrangements of folk tunes from around the globe, its sequel, Desert Bloom, focuses on original compositions that illustrate the bandleader’s signature lyricism.

“The open space provided by the pandemic facilitated weeks of uninterrupted composition time, allowing me to experiment with new approaches,” Hoefner says of the creative process behind Desert Bloom. “I was inspired by post-minimalist composers such as Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and Philip Glass, and dove into exploring repetitive structures, pedal points, and drones in my own writing. These devices also helped me to capture my experience during the early days of the pandemic, which was dominated by the contrast between an unruly and dramatic outside world and a much quieter personal world…The minimalists have made me want to think about the importance of every single note, about shapes and intervals…” 

The name of the album comes from a natural phenomenon that resonated with Hoefner during the pandemic.

“I watched a documentary on water and was blown away by the footage of a desert bloom in Chile’s Atacama Desert – the driest place on earth,” Hoefner says. “In some parts of the desert, rain doesn’t fall for up to 10 years. But then, when the rain does come, the colours explode. After staying dormant in the ground for years, protected underneath the hot and dry desert floor, the seeds of wildflowers suddenly germinate after heavy rainfall, turning the desert into a flower garden within days [..] This is what it has felt like to be a musician over the last two years. Waiting and waiting for the bloom.”

Most of the album had been written by the end of the first pandemic lockdown, but it wasn’t until nearly a year and a half later that the three musicians could reunite in Toronto to record it.

A two-time winner of the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award, has created arrangements can that can be heard on many commercial albums by artists such as Till Brönner, Jasmin Tabatabai, and Peter Fessler. His big-band compositions have been performed by the New York Jazz Orchestra, Lucerne Jazz Orchestra, German Youth Jazz Orchestra, and DanJam Orchestra.

The New York Times has described Hoefner as a “composer-bandleader of insightful resolve”, while Downbeat Magazine has praised him as a “harmonically daring pianist reaching toward new sonic territory”.  

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