For more than twenty years, I’ve been circling the idea of a solo cello record. There is the canon—so many heavies, so many approaches—and in one way or another I’ve been influenced by every cellist I’ve ever heard. When considering my own approach, I couldn’t revisit the records I’d held in high esteem or ask what anyone else would do. I know myself, and I didn’t want a derivative version of my influences. I was stuck with me.

For those who don’t know my work, I usually operate inside improvised music—composer-driven, with a gravitational pull toward jazz. My writing often begins at the piano, where I find harmonic pockets and then orchestrate for specific players. That process didn’t belong here. A solo record needed to come from a different place.

The range and timbre of the cello offer so many possibilities. With looping and effects processing, those possibilities grow tenfold. So what was the right entry point? I found it in the fall of 2023, when I moved into the former home of artist, author, and naturalist Rex Brasher. 

Here, Rex completed his masterwork, "Birds and Trees of North America," a twelve-volume masterpiece meticulously documenting the continent’s avian and arboreal life with unmatched precision and artistry.

Living in that residual energy, you start to notice things: the quality of the light in a room at 3 p.m., how the floors creak in different registers, how the outside air sneaks into the corners of a room. I started tuning into Rex. 

I began spending long stretches of time just improvising—nothing precious, nothing planned. I’d walk from room to room with an acoustic or electric cello, following whatever the house gave me.

Those improvisations gradually became a way of finding pieces I could execute in real time. They functioned as frameworks that took shape the more I played them. If something kept pulling me back—if it felt honest and playable without pretense—I kept it.

I leaned into the tools I’ve always used to expand the instrument: loop pedals, effects, the push and pull between electric and acoustic sound. Slowly, a vocabulary emerged. And for the first time, the idea of a solo record didn’t feel overwhelming. It felt like the natural result of simply being there, paying attention, and letting the cello reveal itself in that space.

In November of 2024, I settled on which frameworks I would move forward with—structures built to be performed live, flexible enough to shift from one performance to the next. Then came the capture. Tracking certain elements separately for fidelity allowed me to take a solo on a given piece many times. Some days it wasn’t happening; other days it flowed.

When I shut off the highly critical voice in my head and focused on the feel and energy of the performance, I found myself playing in ways I hadn’t before. I gravitated toward the less restrained early takes. 

Could I go track by track and eviscerate my intonation or lack of rhythmic precision on any number of moments? Of course.

What surprised me most was that the more I aimed for perfection, the smaller the music became. The more I allowed it to breathe—mistakes, odd corners, unexpected turns—the more it started to feel like a document of who I actually am, not who I imagined a “solo cellist” was supposed to be.

In the end, this record isn’t about flawless execution or about presenting some definitive statement on solo cello. It’s about learning to trust improvisation in its most exposed form. It’s about letting the instrument, the space, and the moment shape the music rather than forcing the music into a predetermined shape.

These recordings are snapshots—honest ones. Some performances feel like I’m discovering the piece in real time; others feel like I’m chasing something just out of reach. But together they form a vocabulary I couldn’t have written any other way.

If anything, this record is me getting out of my own way.

This is what I sound like when I stop trying to make a solo album.

Based in Wassaic, cellist and composer Christopher Hoffman has carved a singular path through contemporary music—working with Henry Threadgill, Darius Jones, Anat Cohen’s Grammy-nominated Tentet, James Brandon Lewis, Martin Scorsese on Shutter Island, and a wide range of leading artists across jazz and experimental music. His new solo album, REX, was recorded in the former home of painter Rex Brasher, where Hoffman now resides on a 116-acre estate. Blending acoustic and electric cello, the record presents Hoffman at his most direct and unaccompanied, shaped by two decades of collaboration at the highest levels of creative music. His previous two releases on Out Of Your Head Records both received wide critical acclaim, Vision Is The Identity (2024) as “a vital slice of contemporary New York” by Jazz Journal, and Asp Nimbus (2021) as “arguably the most fascinating session of 2021” by Bandcamp.