ERIC HOFBAUER
EHX
ABOUT EHX:
EHX is Eric Hofbauer’s most personal project to date — a fluid ensemble that synthesizes the defining threads of his career: conceptual depth, transformative arranging, and a fearlessly eclectic repertoire. The X does double duty. It signals shifting instrumentation: with cello and voice added to the core quartet of tenor, guitar, bass and drums, the ensemble moves fluidly from string trio to classic jazz quintet to intimate voice-and guitar duets to full band orchestration — sometimes within a single arrangement. And it signals what Hofbauer calls “Gen X post-style repertoire”: a book with no boundaries of composer or genre, drawn entirely from music that has shaped his life. Björk, Radiohead, and Sigur Rós sit alongside Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix, which in turn connect to deeper jazz cuts by Abbey Lincoln and Eddie Harris. The repertoire reads like an autobiography — which is precisely the point. “Both my own experience and my mentors taught me to only play songs you love, that really mean something to you,” Hofbauer says. “The EHX plays a book of repertoire that is truly autobiographical. These songs are the soundtrack or mixtape of my life so far, and it’s a beautiful thing to find likeminded players who are all in on this storytelling. EHX is the dream project I’ve been working years on developing and cultivating”
I experience something deeply communal in Black music – and by that I mean music such as reggae, Hip Hop, jazz, blues, rock – when an artist samples, quotes, versions another, there is kinship - Dawn Penn to Bo Diddley, Jay Z to Ice T, John Coltrane to Rodgers and Hammerstein – I think what makes this music so powerful is that it is at once collective and deeply individual. Early on when I was starting to understand that this is what Eric was drawing from, I wrote to him that it felt like falling through time – it sounded to me like he was searching on a reel to reel for a particular moment to cut tape - scratching a record back and forth - he loops a fragment, and just as I start to hum the melody, the guitar zooms off to create another far-reaching experimentation. All of this rooted in a profound intimacy with the music. There is so much love.
- Hayley Thompson-King, Vocalist: EHX
To share one’s story begs both the teller and listener for intimacy, trust, connection and vulnerability. To ask for and listen to each other’s stories is truly one of the most beautiful things we can do for another person. Stories can help us see ourselves in each other and feel connected. As a long-time collaborator and friend of Eric’s, it has been an honor to share stories in life and music and to help him create this autobiography in reimagined cover songs.
I want to offer my take on the titles X, Tongues and Hope Language as a way to frame a listening experience. X is an unknown or something yet to be defined; it can also pinpoint. It symbolizes rejection of being defined, reinvention, and simultaneously claiming itself to be nothing with the possibility of being anything. Our native Tongue is the language we learn from birth, enforced or influenced by family and culture. Our origin story is our tongue, and it is also the language we speak when we are taken over by the spirit. (Collective improvisation comes to mind as an example of “speaking in tongues”.) As we learn and live and grow, listening to others, writing our story, telling our story in our tongue, we will have to embrace change, take various paths, reimagine, reinvent ourselves all the while hopefully moving towards and guided by hope, that thing with feathers, never asking a crumb of us but guiding us toward how we might like to live and be for ourselves and in community. Like the story arc of life and that of the mixtape, it is important to consider the story we are writing for ourselves and telling ourselves within this gorgeous mess of human emotions, interactions and spiritual connections. EHX’s Tongues/Hope Language is like the mixtapes of our youth; painstakingly curated to illuminate one’s feelings, tastes, experiences and interests or perhaps comment on a personal or global topic. The mixtape was laden with a hope that the listener will in some way get turned on to a part of its creator. And so dear listener, thank you for showing up to hear this story, I hope we can find a shared space through this music.
- Tony Leva, Bass: EHX
BIOS CONT.
ANTHONY LEVA (bass) - Tony is a multi-disciplinary artist & educator in Cambridge, MA. Most comfortable on upright bass, Anthony regularly performs with the Unima Award winning puppetry troupe, the Gottabees, as well as the Dylan Jack Quartet, Charlie Kohlhase’s Explorer’s Club, Eric Hofbauer, Brian Carpenter, Samodivi and Jaggery. He is an active collaborator in the Boston Art’s scene where his omnivorous appetite for creativity and collaboration spans theatre, film, puppetry, folk music (Americana, African, and Balkan), as well as jazz, improvised and classical music. In addition to bass, Anthony also plays sintir (a North African bass lute). Anthony has recorded over 30 albums to date. Recent albums include: Having it Out with Melancholy (self-release), A song cycle set to the Poems of Jane Kenyon; music composed by Michael Veloso and performed by Jaggery (a Boston based art rock collective); The Tale of the Twelve-Foot Man (Creative Nation Music); music performed by the Dylan Jack Quartet, and, making his debut on turntables and the SP 303 sampler is Book of Fire (Creative Nation Music), a duo album with Eric Hofbauer.
MIKI MATSUKI (drums) - Miki Matsuki was born in Matsuyama, Japan, and moved to the United States to study jazz at Berklee College of Music in 1996. A talented musician, Miki’s band received the title ‘Best of Berklee’ in 2000. Thereafter, Miki received a full scholarship to The Longy School Of Music, where she graduated with her MM and GPD in Modern American Music Performance with honors. Over the last 25 years, Miki has performed and recorded in various musical settings, including performances through radio and TV broadcasting, a musical tour of Korea, and soundtrack work. Miki has performed with many great musicians, including Wynton Marsalis, Joanne Brackeen, George Garzone, John Tchicai, Darren Barrett, Frank Lacy, Cecil Brooks, Dave Bryant, Stan Strickland and many others.
KYLE ARONSON (drums) - Aronson is from Indianapolis, Indiana, and began playing the drums around age 10. His dad plays drums and was an early inspiration to him. His mom is also a painter, so at a young age, he was taught to try to create something meaningful to him. In 2016 and 2017, he played snare drum in Drum Corps, completing two summer tours around the US, performing in different cities roughly every other day. In 2021, he began his undergrad at Berklee College of Music in Boston. At Berklee, he studied with Neal Smith, Dave DiCenso, James Murphy, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, Billy Kilson, Lil John Roberts, and others. Kyle recently graduated with his Master’s from Longy School of Music in Cambridge. Around Boston, he frequently gigs with local artists throughout the city. Kyle enjoys performing a variety of genres, including jazz, R&B, funk, and pop.
ABOUT: TONGUES / HOPE LANGUAGE
Tongues / Hope Language is a concept double album exploring the sacred power of storytelling — from the direct and literal to the mystical and unspoken. The two discs are two sides of the same question: if Tongues is the act of communication, Hope Language is its content and outcome.
Tongues examines how we speak to power, to each other, and to ourselves. Regina Spektor’s “Us” becomes a driving string trio of rhythmic hockets and a flowing lyric that shifts from soaring declaration to sardonic whisper —
world-weary wisdom delivered with a wink. Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” blends hints of Argentinian chacarera, polyrhythms and eerie electronics to lean into the lyric’s central idea: memory and
nostalgia as coping tools. Hendrix’s “Up from the Skies” is given a poly-tonal harmonic frame, delivered with cool restraint — the calm inside the storm of climate catastrophe. Björk’s “Army of Me” is stripped to percussive, modal jazz that simmers before erupting with distorted force; the text “you’ll face an army of me” never far from the surface.
Hope Language turns inward and outward at once. The album opens with McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son” reimagined on tenor banjo — Hofbauer’s recorded debut on the instrument — traveling from blues Americana to the outer edges of post-bop harmony. Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes The Flood” forms the darker counterpart: pastoral warmth against something menacing, building from whisper to full growl. Sting’s “Russians” becomes a cold war 2.0 revamp — warbly tape-filtered guitar and haunting cello melodies connecting the 1980s to now, the lyric’s plea still piercing. The album closes with Sly Stone’s “Everybody Is a Star” and Abbey Lincoln’s “Long As You’re Living” woven together into a soulful blues elegy — a pure, hard-won hope in humanity to conclude the double album’s arc.
BIOS:
ERIC HOFBAUER (archtop and nylon string guitar, tenor banjo, electronics, arrangements) - " Hofbauer is one of the most genuinely original guitarists of his generation," declares All About Jazz Italia's Mario Calvitti,"capable of renewing the language of jazz guitar with a fresh and iconoclastic approach, but without disrespect to tradition. This distinguishes him from the vast majority of his colleagues, and makes him and his work, worthy of careful consideration.” Hofbauer has been integral to Boston’s jazz scene for over twenty-five years, as a musician, bandleader, organizer and educator. Recognized in the 2024, 2022, and 2019 DownBeat Critics’ Poll for Rising Star – Guitar, he is widely known for his solo guitar work, featured in a collection of solo guitar recordings (American Vanity, American Fear, American Grace and Ghost Frets), and as the leader of the Eric Hofbauer Quintet (EHQ). The EHQ’s series of four “Prehistoric Jazz” recordings, featuring Hofbauer’s jazz arrangements of Stravinsky, Messiaen, Ellington, and Ives, placed consecutively on the Boston Globe’s Top 10 Jazz Albums of the Year lists, and received critical acclaim from leading press such as Fresh Air, Downbeat, and The Wire. Most recently, his Five Agents project; a series of "concept suites" (climate action, humanism) using language (ex. Greta Thunberg speeches, James Baldwin speeches, poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson) as structural and rhythmic inspiration, has been performing in multi-media events that include dancers and video. Hofbauer has also performed and recorded alongside such notable collaborators as Han Bennink, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Roy Campbell, Jr., John Tchicai, Garrison Fewell, Cecil McBee, George Garzone, Sean Jones, Noah Preminger, and Matt Wilson.
NOAH PREMINGER (tenor) - Of Boston-based saxophonist Noah Preminger, The New York Times declares: “Mr. Preminger designs a different kind of sound for each note, an individual destiny and story.” Preminger, 39 years old and two-time winner of Downbeat Magazine’s Rising Star Best Tenor Saxophonist, has recorded over twenty critically acclaimed albums as a band-leader. The Boston Globe hails Preminger as “A master with standards and ballads, as well as an adventurous composer.” The saxophonist has performed on key stages from the United States to Europe and Asia to Australia, and he has played and/or recorded with the likes of Jason Moran, Dave Holland, John Patitucci, Fred Hersch, Jeff Tain Watts, Dave Douglas, Billy Hart, Rob Garcia, Joe Lovano, Victor Lewis, John and Bucky Pizzarelli, Cecil McBee, George Cables, and Roscoe Mitchell. Preminger is currently on faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College.
TEMIDAYO BALOGUN (tenor) - Temidayo's career encompasses solo work and significant collaborations with a diverse array of musicians and groups across both Nigeria and the USA. His collaborators include individual artists such as Yinka Davies, Taye Mayegha, and Tosin Aribisala. Additionally, he has worked with groups like The Lagos Jazz Series Quintet, Generayshun, The Native Brains, Ope and the Stereo Choir, and Jazz in My Room. In Boston, his collaborative projects feature The Makanda Project, New England Jazz Collaborative, Eric Hofbauer Quartet, and Charlie Kohlhase’s Saxophone Support Group. A significant achievement in his jazz career is his involvement in The Makanda Project, led by John Kordalewski. This has provided him the opportunity to collaborate with jazz legends, including Chico Freeman, Avery Sharpe, Dee Alexander, Ricky Ford, Warren Smith, and Bill Lowe.
HAYLEY THOMPSON-KING (voice) - Hayley has been recognized internationally for her songwriting, stage performance, and “explosive display of vocal prowess” (PopMatters) since she emerged onto the rock scene fronting garage-rock trio Banditas in 2012. Her debut solo album, Psychotic Melancholia (2017) was praised by Paste Magazine as “a positively jaw-dropping exposition that celebrates the entire canon of rock ‘n’ roll’s energy, and should be considered an upping of the ante on the gritty sonic real estate of garage, punk, country, and Americana, into some amalgam altogether more apt of Thompson-King’s wondrous artistic aptitudes.” In addition to her solo artistic output, she has collaborated as a vocalist with Major Stars - appearing on the albums Motion Set (Drag City) and Decibels of Gratitude (Important Records) - The Upper Crust, and Nat Freedberg. In 2025/26 she was featured on saxophonist Zishi Liu’s single “Landslide” and alt-jazz guitarist Eric Hofbauer’s album Tongues / Hope Language. Hayley is on the voice faculty at Berklee College of Music as an Associate Professor, as well as a Teaching Artist in Jazz and Contemporary Music at Longy School of Music of Bard College - she specializes in vocal distortion and improvisation.
ANA OSPINA (cello) - Ana is a passionate and versatile cellist and educator originally from Colombia. She holds a Master of Music in Cello Performance from the Longy School of Music of Bard College and a Bachelor of Arts in Cello Performance from William Carey University.
Chamber music and global music are two of her greatest passions, which has led Ana to perform regularly with ensembles and orchestras in the Boston area and appeared in notable concerts and festivals in the Americas. These include the world premiere of Señora del Paisaje by César Zambrano in Ibagué, Colombia; as principal cellist in the debut
performance of the Camerata Ibagué at the Festival Música nas Montanhas in Poços de Caldas, Brazil; and her participation in the Global Musicians Workshop by Silkroad, where she performed at Jordan Hall in Boston. She is currently pursuing a Graduate Performance Diploma under Professor Christine Lamprea at the Longy School of Music.