So German!

How does a German musician end up in St. John’s, Newfoundland in Canada?

I moved to New York City in 2008 with a Fulbright Scholarship to do my master’s at the Manhattan School of Music. There, I got to know my wife who is Canadian! After we lived in New York for 6 years, she got a job at the University in St. John’s in Newfoundland as professor for clarinet and saxophone.. As a musician, it is very hard to get a fulltime job so we decided to move to the very Eastern end of Canada in 2014. And this is how I ended up in Canada!

You live and work in Canada. Nevertheless, you produced the album Moose Blues in 2018 with your German group Subtone. How did the production come about?

Well, I still have lots of contacts from my time before I moved to Canada and Subtone is my longest running project. Before I went to New York, I studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin where I did my undergraduate in jazz. During this time, we started the band Subtone. Me and my colleagues are all old friends. We all went to the same school. We even kept the band going when I was in New York, and also when I moved to Canada.
So we wanted to use the opportunity of me living in Canada to do a Canadian-focused project, so I organized a two-week tour through Canada for the group. While we were together, we thought why not record a CD afterwards? There are really great recording studios and engineers in Canada.
We all live in different places, three people are still in Germany, the bass player is in New York and I’m here, so it is really hard to do projects together. We really used that opportunity to be in Canada together to develop and record the new album.

What was the most remarkable experience of your tour through Canada?

For the other four who have never been to Canada before it was just the country itself and its size. They were floored by the beauty of Canada. We played in some really nice places, for example in the Rocky Mountains. When we drove through the Rockies, they couldn’t believe how beautiful it is. For them, the whole tour was a great experience. They really enjoyed the bigger cities in the East, too, like Montreal and Toronto. We like the multiculturalism which we don’t see in Germany to that degree.

Do you think your band colleagues will come back?

Oh absolutely! They do want to come back! It is financially difficult to put a tour like that together but we definitely want to do it again at some point.

Why the name Moose Blues?

We were looking for a name that would refer to Canada in some way because it was such a great experience for all of us. It is also the name of a tune that I wrote which is on the record. The tune is kind of humorous and the title is supposed to be humorous, too. So we thought it’d be a good fit for the record to hint at Canada and to be a little bit humorous at the same time.

Besides Subtone, you have another band, the Florian Hoefner Trio which is mostly active in Canada. Is there a difference in the style of music?

There is also a third project that stems from the time in New York, the Florian Hoefner Group which is a quartet. My Canadian band is the Florian Hoefner Trio, the other two musicians live in Toronto. The style of the trio is different both from Subtone and the quartet because I took a different approach in writing and creating music for this ensemble. I didn’t want to just do the same thing again as in the other bands, so for the trio, my idea was to take folk tunes and also some country tunes and then arrange them for a piano trio. These are just tunes that I personally like and that are somewhat outside the typical Jazz repertoire. I also wrote a couple of original songs that are in the same style.
Regarding Subtone and the Florian Hoefner Group, almost all of the songs are original. For the trio, I am focusing more on material that is not my own and give my own spin and compositional language to it during the arrangement process.

Florian Hoefner Trio by Bo Huang

How did you meet your bandmates? Are they all Canadian?

I’ve been to Toronto many times since I met my wife in 2008 because she is from Toronto. Whenever I went, I tried to set up some shows or sessions with musicians from Toronto so I slowly got to know the Toronto jazz scene. I was introduced to Nick Fraser, the drummer, through a mutual friend who is also a pianist. He is a very versatile player, a great listener and makes good decisions for the band. Then Nick introduced me to Andrew Downing. They have been playing together a lot and when I was looking for the bass player for this project, I was looking for someone who is also very good with the bow. I wrote a lot of parts that used a bow to refer to the color of the fiddle that you can find in a lot of folk tunes. Usually, jazz players don’t use the bow too much, jazz is mostly just pizzicato. But Andrew is someone who is really fantastic with the bow because he also plays the cello, so he was a natural choice for that project!

Is it sometimes hard to coordinate between all the groups you are part of?

It is a lot to keep all three groups going. To be honest, you can never give the same attention to all the groups at the same time. One group can be dormant for a while and I focus on another group and then the dormant group comes back. Right now I am focusing on the trio, so I am not doing as much with the quartet but at some point I’ll probably do a new quartet record and then there will be a little less focus on the trio. You always focus on one ensemble. And Subtone is a bit different, because it is a collective, it is not my band. Everyone is responsible for the band, all five members. I don’t have to carry the full load for that band. So it keeps going even if it does not always have my full attention.
I like working in all three bands because they are all very different and they all have different people that I love to play with. It’s my plan to keep all three going. The trio record is coming out in September, so naturally the trio is my focus right now. After that, I may do a second trio record or maybe a new quartet record and then the focus will be shifted again.
But I am playing with the quartet as well, this year we are doing an Australian tour in June so the quartet will be together again.

What do you miss about Germany?

There are a couple of things I miss about Germany. Germany is just so convenient for getting around, you just hop on the train and you can be basically anywhere within a day. Especially where I live now, in St John’s, I cannot go anywhere without taking a flight. In terms of my playing and performing career I basically always have to take the plane to perform or to see family. Whenever I am back in Germany it is much easier to get around.
Also, I love all the bakeries in Germany and the fresh bread you can get everywhere. I miss that here. Even though St. John’s is a bit of an exception because there is one outstanding bakery that is even better than a lot of German bakeries!

What do you love about Canada?

I love the country itself, the beauty of it, the size and that you can still find untouched nature. What I like about Germany is that you can travel around. But then, the flipside of it is that there is not much untouched nature left, right? It is pretty much settled, the whole country. Everything feels really tight and dense. In Canada, you really feel the size of the country! Even if you go to a tourist hot spot in the summer, it’s still never like anywhere in Europe where you can’t see anything because there are so many people. It is just all much more spread out. Driving is much more relaxed as well.
I also love the people of Canada, the multiculturalism, all the different ethnicities that you find here and also the openness towards that. That’s something I really like about Canada.

Do you ever think about moving back to Germany?

The reality is that it’s not really a possibility for us because my wife is mainly a clarinetist and in Germany they play a different type of clarinet, it is a different finger system. She would have a very hard time finding work in Germany because of the different type of clarinets. Because of that, it is kind of unrealistic for us to move back to Germany in the near future. And also, I really love living in Canada and I don’t have the wish to go back soon.

If you could choose freely, with which musician would you like to do a jam session?

That’s a good question, there are so many! Let’s try to put together my absolute dream band. Brian Blade on drums, probably. I really like Ben Street for the bass, that would be great. That would be for a trio. For a saxophonist, there are also so many good options. I really like Seamus Blake. He has is on my quartet record, so that one actually already happened. He would definitely be a good pick.

What comes next? What are your plans for 2019?

My project right now is a composition project. I am currently writing a piece for my wife. She has an ensemble with two American musicians called the Iris Trio. They want to do a new album and the idea is to feature some contemporary composers. So I got a grant from the Newfoundland Arts Council to write a new piece for that ensemble for the trio of clarinet, viola and piano. That’s going to be a classical composition, all written out, no chord changes. But of course, it will have some jazz language in it. That is my project right now and then for the second half of 2019, the Florian Hoefner Trio CD will be out, and we’ll do some touring. I’ll probably start writing some music for a new jazz album, but I’m not quite sure yet what that’s going to be.