Fresh from their win at the Juno music awards last month, the Florian Hoefner Trio is poised to make their inaugural Sunshine Coast appearance this weekend with a mix of tunes that translate pandemic isolation into contagious jazz.
The group, headed up by German-born Florian Hoefner, will perform at the High Beam Dreams event centre on Friday, April 14. The trio’s album Desert Bloom was recognized as Jazz Album of the Year during the Juno awards held one month ago in Edmonton.
“I was completely surprised at the news,” said Hoefner, a pianist and composer who also teaches jazz at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. “The album didn’t flow together as easily as it would in times when you’d have months to make it. We didn’t know beforehand. All of a sudden they open the envelope and they call your name. You almost have to pinch yourself.”
The Desert Bloom album, the basis for the trio’s current West Coast tour, is a long-anticipated public outing for the nine-track work that was conceived in the midst of COVID-19 restrictions.
The titles themselves reflect a time when the world came to a standstill: The Day Everything Stopped, The End of the Tunnel, and It’s All Part of the Plan. During the lockdown, Hoefner used newfound free time to compose songs in one stretch, instead of his usual piecemeal approach.
“We usually write pieces and then we incorporate them into our touring repertoire and play them and then eventually record them,” he said. “But this was different. Then I couldn’t get it played for almost a year because I couldn’t travel to Toronto and [bandmates] Nick Fraser and Andrew Downing couldn’t travel to St. John’s. So I was sitting on this new music.”
The album was finally recorded in August 2021, after a four-hour rehearsal.
Desert Bloom (also the name of one of Hoefner’s original tracks), alludes to the post-pandemic resurgence of the music industry after a multiyear creative drought. Hoefner says his colleagues are feeling newfound energy and optimism now that touring is permitted again.
The trio’s latest album follows their 2019 release of First Spring, which featured arrangements of folk tunes from around the world. Desert Bloom contains seven new compositions that emphasize Hoefner’s lyricism and knack for musical dramaturgy, plus two new arrangements of pieces out of the contemporary indie rock and bluegrass world.
Hoefner’s appetite for minimalism on the keyboard extends to Fraser’s work on drums and Downing’s contributions on bass. Their musical economy communicates a sense of simultaneous absence and richness: every phrase is weighed and venerated.
“Minimalism is a colour or compositional technique that has really resonated with me,” said Hoefner. “The whole album is an experiment in introducing some of those techniques into jazz, which seems surprising because jazz is everything but minimalism, right?”
Tickets for the Florian Hoefner Trio performance can be ordered online at highbeamdreams.com.
