What do I know about Christopher Hoffman? More than anyone, certainly, and less than anyone, possibly. Those two facts don’t cancel out so much as multiply into something much worse. I have known him since before I had a self to know him with. Self. It’s not even mine so much as it’s an extension of him. At least, that’s what I believed for most of my life. Lately it has occurred to me that he might not have a self either. The older I get, the more it seems to me that my father belongs to the cello every bit as much as he belongs to himself.
This is supposed to be a recollection of a tour. We spent three weeks traveling through seven cities for his album called Rex. And it is. But I can’t tell you any of it honestly without admitting the kind of witness you’re getting, because it’s not the kind you’d want on a jury. I can describe the different cello cases he’s had over the years better than I can describe most human faces. His old forest green one was my favorite refuge. When I was small, I’d stand it upright in the living room and disappear into the hollow shell. I know he scouts a restaurant for the quietest corner to tuck his cello into before he even thinks about sitting down. I know this because I now do it too, without meaning to, in restaurants of my own. What do you do with knowledge like that? None of it is knowledge of a person in the ordinary sense. When we walk together, I notice the shadows on the pavement before anything else. His has grown impossible to parse. The silhouette of the cello has merged into his own so completely that I’ve lost track of where the wood ends and where he begins.
What I don’t know is whether any of it qualifies me to tell you what he’s like, or what his music is like, or what the tour was like. Or if it actually makes me the most qualified person to tell you. On tour, people loved to ask what he was like offstage. What it was like being raised by a musician. By a cello player, they sometimes specified, as if the instrument somehow clarifies the question. It doesn’t. It complicates it. The honest answer is there wasn’t much of an offstage to speak of. The cello inhabited every room of my childhood. He used to bring me to gigs when I was a kid instead of hiring a babysitter and sat me down in the corner with my sketchbook. I did my homework while he practiced in the next room more often than not. My memories are mostly noise. Constant, specific, high quality noise, coming from somewhere else, at all hours, whether or not anyone had asked for it. So I’ll tell you about the tour anyway. I just want you to know exactly how much to trust a witness who has spent her whole life next to a man she’s never once fully seen separated from whatever has ahold of him.
Rex is not a tribute to Rex, whose house Christopher has been living in for two years, though I won’t fault anyone for assuming so. I find it to be something a little stranger. I heard the notes being played long before they were recorded and titled. I heard Christopher speak to something I could not hear, walking between rooms with the electric cello, following some thread that wasn’t visible to me. Was the house alive? Was Rex as alive as he was dead? I couldn’t tell you. But something had clearly murmured through Christopher because he kept replying to it, kept adjusting, and kept listening. He spent months doing that, until one day the macabre exchange had a name and somewhere to go. This summer it left the house, and for the first time he let me follow him and it out the door.
What do I know about Christopher Hoffman indeed. Night after night, ahead of the set and amidst his repertoire, Christopher told the story of Rex. He talked about the house and its “silent” rooms. He talked about the small burial site behind Rex’s home for Pal and for Marie. He talked about his own lonely meanderings over Rex’s mountain and into the valley. Strangers in their lopsided folding chairs leaned in as if they’d be granted something more tangible if only they were a few inches closer. Then, Christopher would fall briefly still. Some nights he reached for the electric cello. Other nights, the acoustic. I never once saw him make that deliberation out loud. He'd take in the room and seem to know. Is that a read, or is it something closer to telepathy? Somewhere between the two sits whatever lets a person receive an answer from a room full of unknown faces without asking anything of them.
The tour began in Minneapolis at a bustling joint by the name of Berlin. By the second night, at the Lakely Gallery in Eau Claire, Christopher had already rewritten the entire setlist. Madison’s Gamma-Ray pulled the songs into something faster and sharper. Milwaukee slowed them down until certain pieces barely resembled the recordings at all, stretched open by a room and a moment that would never happen again. By then I realized that my idea of music being a fixed object was abhorrently off base and a little ignorant besides. The songs behaved more like living things. They changed depending on who entered the room, what the room offered back, and what the instrument decided to reveal on that particular night. And the strange thing was that Christopher seemed to become less and less in charge. But he was listening. He was always listening.
Some bars are eerie and haunted, brimming with other people’s stories. The Hungry Brain in Chicago was one of those. An old friend of Christopher’s found me at the bar and said he always knew my father would be here, doing this. The two of them worked together at a waterpark in their early twenties. On rainy days, when the park was particularly empty, my father used to carry his cello into the recreational center. Two hundred and fifty chairs with nobody in them, and he’d drag one chair away from the rest of them and play for hours. My father has no recollection of that story. Did he forget because practicing had just been so routine for him? That’s probably the answer he’d give. Fine. Except I watched him play that same night, right after hearing the story, and I noticed something I didn’t let myself notice before. There’s a certain way his head jolts, almost involuntarily, at certain turns in a phrase, like something arrives in him a half second before his hands manage to catch up to it. And it occurred to me that his offhand answer, oh, it was just practice, might not be modesty at all, and that it might not be routine either. Something else might genuinely be in control of him for those hours.
The air slinked into a sleek quietness of its own that night. A bar that dark has no dimming light to announce a hush, and neither does Christopher. But somewhere near the front, someone noticed him pick up the cello and shushed the person beside them, and it moved backward through that loud room, table by table, until a bar that noisy had gone almost entirely still on instinct alone. Strangers! Policing their own volume for a man most of them had walked in that night not knowing existed. To call it charisma would be too simple. Manners? Perhaps, although people seldom have many of those anymore. I’ve decided it’s what a room does, correctly, in the presence of something it senses isn’t quite human-scaled. Those people must’ve felt it too before they heard a single note.
Still, there were more discoveries to be made at The Treelawn in Cleveland. A couple approached the merch table that I was dutifully stationed at after the show. Curiosity got the better of me as it so often does and I asked how they had found the music. Well, they hadn’t followed Christopher’s work for years and they weren’t part of some long trail of listeners. But it was one of their birthdays, and they had been looking for a concert to go to. Christopher’s happened to be the coolest option. (Their words, not mine.) I liked their answer because it felt strangely appropriate, particularly the word “happened” which invites talks of coincidence and chance. You stop believing in those after enough of them happen — and oh, how delightfully it implores the idea of a happening.
And then there was the Baum Baum Club. Saxophonist Patrick Breiner opened with his own trio, Two of Anything, joined by Mark Micchelli and Antonio Croes. Christopher played solo next. Then all four musicians closed the night together, fully improvised, and it was there that the evening’s logic was finally said out loud. Breiner announced, before anyone played a note, that whatever came next would only exist once, in that room, for whoever happened to be sitting there, and nowhere else, ever again. I understood exactly what he meant. I’d heard some version of that sentence enough nights to know. Whatever lives in my father and those musicians doesn’t keep track of itself. It listens, it answers, and it claws its way out through calloused hands into a few minutes of borrowed time that we’ve agreed to call music. It leaves nothing behind except the loose memory of having been there, and even that begins changing the moment you try to describe it. You can only point toward the place where it briefly revealed itself.
I think there are things a person can be taken over by and never learn the name for. Practice is the word Christopher uses because it's the closest polite word available. And it’s easier to say Rex loved birds when what we probably mean is something nearer to captured. Whatever it is, something clearly takes over Christopher anyway once he’s been playing long enough. Watch him for more than a few minutes and you’ll glean the way he tilts into the cello like he’s following a sound that isn’t quite his own yet. What do you call a person like that? I don’t know. I call him my dad.
Somewhere on I-86, on the drive out before any of this, a hawk was gliding along the shoulder of the highway when a blackbird a quarter of its size came at it. And it kept coming, dive after dive. Shouldn’t a creature that outsized pause to weigh its odds first? Do the math before committing? Did Rex? Did Christopher? I doubt it.
The things worth giving your life to have a habit of asking for a little more than seems reasonable. The trick is not to argue. Say yes before you’ve calculated whether you’re the correct size for what you’re going after. Say yes to the blank pages. Say yes to the empty chairs that no one asked you to play to. Say yes to the chances like your life depends on it. It does. You will not get an unlimited number of these. Take the ones that come. That’s the whole of it.