paulhoffert.ca    musician, performing artist

Recent

In the past few years he has performed extensively across Canada; in Ajax, Aliston, Bala, Barrie, Belleville, Brampton, Brandon, Brantford, Brockville, Burlington, Calgary, Charlottetown, Chatham, Cornwall, Edmonton, Fredericton, Gananoque, Glace Bay, Guelph , Halifax, Huntsville, Kingston, Kitchener, Lethbridge, Listowell, London, Markham, Mattawa, Meaford, Minnedosa, Mississauga, Moose Jaw, Mt. Forest, New Liskeard, Niagara, North Bay, Oakville, Orillia, Oshawa, Ottawa, Owen Sound, Parry Sound, Penticton, Peterborough, Port  Credit, Port Hope, Regina, Richmond Hill, Saint John, Sarnia, Saskatchewan, Southampton, St. Albert, St. Catherines, Sudbury, Teeswater, Thunder Bay, Uxbridge, Vancouver, Waterloo, Windsor, Winnipeg, and Woodstock.

He performs regularly with the Gelcer-Hoffert Jazz Trio whose CD, How High The Bird, has been in constant rotation at JazzFM and other jazz station since its 2011 release and has become a regular at jazz festivals.

Recent conducting duties include 2009 performances of the opera Brundibar including a Toronto Koerner Hall concert and a 2011 recording of Leo Spellman’s Rhapsody 1939-1945. Hoffert conducted the Canadian premier performance of the Rhapsody 1939-1945 at the Enwave Harbourfront Theatre in 2012.

Performer Short Bio

Paul (Poli) Hoffert was born in Brooklyn, New York where he studied classical piano but was drawn to the music of Fats Domino, Little Richard, and the doo-wop groups of the ‘fifties. When he was 13, Paul started his first band, the Boptones, which performed in the New York area and released two recordings, I Wanna Love You and Betty Jean.

He moved with his family to Toronto when he was 14 and took up the vibraphone (vibes). Within a year he was performing regularly at coffee houses and in recording studios. When he was 16 he became a regular performer on CBC network television programs and this led to a record deal for his first LP, The Jazz Routes of Paul Hoffert.

Hoffert studied music composition with Gordon Delamont and, by the time he was 22, he had composed several feature film music scores and written an Off-Broadway musical, Get Thee To Canterbury.

He performed regularly with jazz greats Moe Koffman, Ed Bickert, Guido Basso, and Rob McConnell and also performed classical music, specializing in contemporary composers Harry Freedman, Harry Somers, Gunther Schuller, R. Murray Shafer, and Louis Applebaum. He was a percussionist with the Toronto Symphony for music recordings.

In 1969 Hoffert founded the rock band Lighthouse with Skip Prokop, singing and playing keyboards, vibes, and conga drums. Recognized as one of the best performing acts of the classic rock era, Lighthouse toured constantly, originated sponsored (Labatt) cross-country tours, and played to sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall, the Fillmore East, Fillmore West, Boston Globe Jazz Festival, Newport Jazz festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, National Arts Centre, Place des Arts, Expo ‘70 in Japan and the Isle of Wight in England. Lighthouse toured North America with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Company (1971) and South America with Oscar Peterson and Desrosiers Dance Theatre (1995).

Lighthouse shared top billings with Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Miles Davis, Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears, and Santana among others. Elton John was Lighthouse’s opening act when he first performed in the US.

Back home, Lighthouse’s free concerts at Toronto’s Nathan Philips Square attracted more than a hundred thousand fans.  It would be hard to find someone who lived in Canada through the 1970s who hasn’t seen the group perform.  They were and are Canada’s band.

As Lighthouse’s music director, Hoffert broke new ground in the fields of both pop and classical music. Along with Miles Davis, he is credited as one of the creators of fusion music, the blend of rock rhythms with jazz improvisations. He composed and conducted the first collaborations by a rock band with symphony orchestras in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Edmonton. He composed and performed the first ever rock ballet, Ballet High. These were great critical and commercial successes and brought new younger audiences to appreciate the treasures of orchestral music and dance.

In 1971 Lighthouse won the first of three successive Juno Awards for Best Group of the Year. They earned eight gold, the first platinum by a Canadian artist, and diamond awards for its record sales. The band could be seen on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on Coca Cola bottle caps.

Hoffert took a break from Lighthouse touring 1973. He founded Rock and Roll Records and produced artists such as Bob McBride, Bill King, Flower Traveling Band, Snakeye, Robbie Rox, and Flying Circus while continuing as Lighthouse’s executive producer. During that period, he was a founder of CIRPA, the Canadian Independent Record Production Association.

In 1975 Hoffert became pianist/conductor for Craig Russell, internationally acclaimed impersonator and star of the award winning Outrageous feature film. They performed concerts together throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall (twice), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Berlin Theatre Festival, Sydney Opera House, and Massey Hall.

In 1992 Lighthouse reformed and has been performing regularly ever since, bringing in the turn of the 21st century at the Parliament Hill Canada Day Celebrations, and continuing to perform across Canada (see Recent 2009-).
 
Hoffert appears regularly as a radio and television host and guest, recently on Canada AM, Squeezeplay, Business News Network, Breakfast Television, and Ontario Today.
He was a lead performer in One Fine Story—a theatrical history of the music business directed by David Acomba.

Hoffert was the first professional performer to embrace technology for distributed live musical performances. His pioneering demonstrations of music collaborations at distance at the Smart City Conference in 1995 and at the InterActive ’96 conference led to the use of these technologies for the opening ceremonies of the 1998 Olympics. In 1999, Hoffert performed live in Toronto with other musicians in Richmond Hill and Brampton. In 2001, he performed at the Supercomputing 2001 Conference in Chicago linked with other performers in Toronto and Denver. 
Hoffert spent much of 2006-8 in China, working with Harvard University and the Chinese government to monetize file sharing there so that artists and composers can be paid royalties in the future. During that time, he toured China as a performer with world music diva Dadawa (Zhu Zheqing).

Hoffert was music director of the Blue Mountain School of Music 1975-77 at George Brown College. He was appointed adjunct Professor of Fine Arts at York University in 1984, Research Professor at Sheridan College in 1999, Faculty Fellow at Harvard University in 2005, and a director of McGill University's Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology in 2007. He has taught at Beijing University and the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi. In 2012, he received a doctorate from the University of Toronto, performing at his Music Faculty commencement as well as making the commencement address.

Hoffert was a founder and Chair of the Canadian Academy of Cinema and Television and executive producer of the Gemini Awards in 1985 and 1986. He was Chair of the Ontario Arts Council 1994-97 and is currently Chair of the Screen Composers Guild of Canada and Chair of the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund.

Hoffert has served on many non-profit boards including the Canadian Performing Rights Society (1984-90); SOCAN Foundation (1993-2009); Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (1998-2003); Virtual Museum of Canada (2000-2005); Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund (1999-); the Glenn Gould Foundation (2000-), and the United Nations World Summit on Information Societies.

He is the author of five books, including The Hoffert Guide for Synchronizing Music with Media and Composing Music for Videogames, Web, and Mobile. In 1996, Hoffert was inducted into the Canadian Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He received the Order of Canada in 2004 for contributions to music, media, and society.

Selected Performances

Conductor: 1962-
Hoffert conducted the Canadian premier performance of Leo Spellman’s Rhapsody 1939-1945 at the Ashkenaz Harbourfront Festival in 2012. He conducted the opera, Brundibar at Toronto’s Koerner Hall in 2009. He has conducted many film scores for film, television, and sound recordings with orchestras such as the London Philharmonic, Bavarian Film Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Edmonton Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Prague Opera Orchestra, and studio orchestras. His conducting of non-original works includes a Placido Domingo disk for SONY records and an Igor Stravinsky (L’histoire du Soldat) CD for Marquis records.

Pianist, Vibraphonist: 1958-1969, 2009-
Mr. Hoffert returned to his jazz performance roots in 2010. He performs regularly at jazz festivals and at his weekly “Poli’s Jazz Salon” that features internally renowned jazz performers. Hoffert was animator-performer (Vibraphonist) of a distributed WAN live performance, with Hoffert in Denver + dancer, visual artist, and additional music in Toronto in February 2001.

He occasionally performs as a classical pianist including a Winnipeg performance in 2000 of Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody with conductor Bramwell Tovey.

Lighthouse Music Director, Keyboardist, Vocalist, Percussionist: 1968-1972, 1982, 2001-
Mr. Hoffert is founder of and lead performer with Lighthouse (www.lighthouserockson.com). Lighthouse has headlined more than 500 concert performances. Lighthouse is currently touring to support the 2009 release of its DVD/CD, 40 Years of Sunny Days. Previous concert performances include: Carnegie Hall, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Fillmore East, Fillmore West, Atlantic City Pop Festival, Isle Of Wight Festival (England), Boston Globe Jazz Festival, Newport Jazz festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Expo '70 (Osaka, Japan), Massey Hall, National Arts Centre, Place des Arts, North American tour with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet company (1971), South American tour with Oscar Peterson and Desrosiers Dance Theatre (1995), Canadian National Exhibition, and the Calgary Stampede. He  was a featured vocalist at the Canada Day Celebrations at Parliament Hill, 2000, CBC Television, Ottawa

 
As Lighthouse’s music director, Hoffert broke new ground in the fields of both pop and classical music. He was one of the creators of what is now known as fusion music, the blend of rock and jazz genres. He composed and conducted the first performances anywhere by a rock band with a symphony orchestra (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Edmonton symphonies). He also composed and performed the first ever collaboration between a rock band and a classical ballet company (The Royal Winnipeg). These were great critical and commercial successes and brought new and younger audiences to appreciate the treasures of classical music and dance.

Lighthouse earned eight gold, platinum, and diamond albums for record sales and is a three-time Juno Award winner as Canada’s top band. Mr. Hoffert was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Canada) in 1995.

Performer: One Fine Story, 2009-
Mr. Hoffert is a lead performer in this presentation of the history of the music business, seen through the eyes of a musician in a band that experiences the ups and downs of fame, fortune, failure, and resurrection, directed by David Acomba.

Musician, Performer: Dadawa (Zhu Zheqing), 2006
Mr. Hoffert toured in China with world music diva (Zhu Zheqing)

Distributed Music Performer, 1995-2001
Mr. Hoffert was the first professional performer to embrace live distributed musical performances, using analog TV and telephone networks at first to connect musicians distributed in different locations and then digital networks when they became available. His demonstration at the InterActive ’96 Cyber Soiree (see below) of feasible technologies and performance environments for networked performances led to the use of these for the opening ceremonies of the 1998 Olympics, at which Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was performed with orchestras and choruses distributed throughout the world.

Mr. Hoffert was vibraphonist for a distributed live performance at the Supercomputing 2001 Conference in Denver with a dancer, visual artist, and additional musicians in Toronto, February 2001
He performed live in 2000 as part of the International Smart City Conference at Toronto’s BCE Place with Lighthouse, synchronized at distance with a string orchestra at Brampton Ontario’s City Hall and a percussionist at the Richmond Hill Library. The connectivity was by direct fibre end-to-end with no signal compression and minimal network latency (delay).

He was the producer, host, and performer in 1996 at the Cyber Soiree conference in Toronto where he demonstrated a distributed low-latency live performance network using symmetrical audio and video feeds to four sites across the continent in two countries (US and Canada). Cyber Soiree 96 featured jazz musicians, dancers, and painters collaborating in real time at four locations in Quebec and Ontario. Cyber Soiree 97 expanded the horizons to Los Angeles at the official residence of Canada's Consul General where one hundred Hollywood denizens were partied (virtually) with suburban residents in Newmarket Ontario, conference attendees in downtown Toronto and one thousand party-goers at Citytv's ShmoozeFest - a party for Toronto's International Film Festival.

He performed one of the first distributed live music demonstrations in 1995 at the closing ceremonies of the international Smart Cities conference with half the musicians live at one site and the other half at another site twenty kilometers distant. The two locations were telepresenced bi-directionally with life-sized screens using broadband audio and video.

Musical Director, Arranger, Pianist: Craig Russell, 1975-1981
Mr. Hoffert was the music director, arranger, and pianist for Craig Russell, internationally acclaimed impersonator and star of the feature films “Outrageous” and “Outrageous 2”. After composing the music score and signature songs (It Ain’t Easy and Step Out) for Outrageous, Mr. Hoffert traveled with Craig Russell performing concerts throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall (twice), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Berlin Theatre Festival, Sydney Opera House, and Massey Hall. Mr. Hoffert conducted the twenty-two piece jazz band from the piano.

Vibraphonist, Percussionist, & Pianist 1958-1969
Mr. Hoffert began working as a professional percussionist when he was fifteen (1958). Before he founded Lighthouse, he played on hundreds of television programs, commercials, and recordings and performed live concerts. He played regularly with jazz greats Moe Koffman, Ed Bickert, Guido Basso, Rob McConnell and Sonny Greenwich at Toronto’s House of Hamburg, Cellar Jazz Club, First Floor Club, and jazz festivals.

His television career started in 1959-1961 when he became a regular guest on the CBC television series While We’re Young and continued 1963-1965 as performer and music director for the CBC series Time of Your Life.

He worked with and performed the music of 20th century composers including Harry Freedman, Harry Somers, Gunther Schuller, R. Murray Shafer, and Louis Applebaum. Hoffert also recorded as a percussionist with the Toronto Symphony for its 20th century music recordings (Pierre Mercure, etc.)

Brooklyn, New York Performances as a pre-teen 1954-1956
When he was eleven years old, Mr. Hoffert started his professional music career singing with the Oscar Julius Choir in synagogues, performing with the with the Happy Zabezi Caribbean Band as well as singing and playing piano with the Boptones, a doo-wop pop group with whom he recorded his first 45 RPM record.