Tobias Hoffmann’s Debut Album Gets a Second Life

Tobias Hoffmann’s debut as a bandleader is back where anyone can hear it. Six years after it first appeared on the Austrian label Alessa Records, Retrospective has found a new home on Mons Records.

I’ve followed Hoffmann’s work since interviewing him back in September 2022 around the release of Conspiracy, so it’s been genuinely satisfying to watch the arc of his output on Mons take shape — nonet to orchestra, debut to designs on something bigger still. Retrospective’s reissue on May 15th closes a loop that shouldn’t have needed closing in the first place.

The reason for the rerelease is almost mundane, which is exactly what makes it worth stating plainly: Hoffmann’s former label took its catalogue offline, and Retrospective simply vanished from streaming platforms. For an album this important to him, that was more than an inconvenience. “It was disappointing to see an album that means so much to me suddenly become inaccessible, and I wanted to make sure people could discover and listen to this music again,” he told me.

Retrospective earns that sentiment. It was Hoffmann’s first outing as a bandleader and composer in his own right, the beginning of the artistic path he’s been walking ever since. The record also picked up real recognition on release, taking First Prize in the Band category at the 2019 Made in New York Jazz Competition, judged by Randy Brecker, Mike Stern, and Lenny White — good company for a debut. Michael Abene, no small authority on large ensemble writing himself, put it simply in his testimonial for the record: Hoffmann gets a “wonderful fat sound… out of five horns and four rhythm.”

The nonet lineup on Retrospective — Hoffmann on tenor and soprano sax alongside Simon Plötzeneder, Stefan Gottfried, Fabian Rucker, Daniel Holzleitner, Christopher Pawluk, Philipp Nykrin, Andreas Waelti, and Michael Prowaznik — plays through ten tracks including “Happenstances” and “Procrastinator,” both of which Mons has been pushing through social video content this year. Hoffmann himself sees the album less as a standalone artifact than as the first chapter of a continuing story. “Everything you do as a musician is based on what you’ve done in the past,” he’s said of the record’s relationship to his later orchestra work — and that lineage runs directly through Conspiracy and Innuendo to what’s coming next.

What’s coming next is considerably bigger. Hoffmann and his eighteen-piece Jazz Orchestra head into Audiotope Studios in Graz at the end of August to record a third orchestra album, announced under the title Third Space. It will be his third release with Mons in that format, following Conspiracy in 2022 and Innuendo in 2024, and by his own account it pushes the compositional ambitions of both records considerably further.

“With every project I’ve become more interested in writing through-composed works and larger musical forms rather than collections of individual pieces,” Hoffmann told me. “On this album, that idea has developed even further. The compositions are more interconnected, the dramaturgy will play a much bigger role, and I’ve expanded both my orchestration and my compositional vocabulary.” Jazz remains the foundation, but he’s leaning increasingly on contemporary classical music for inspiration — an interest in long-form development and the transformation of small musical ideas that sits alongside, rather than replaces, the improvisational core of the writing.

Conceptually, Third Space is his most cohesive project to date. Hoffmann describes it as an exploration of “the fractured self” — a psychological journey through identity, grief, contradiction, and eventually acceptance, shaped by the roles friendship, love, rivalry, and social expectation play in how we experience ourselves. “Rather than telling a literal story, the music should create emotional spaces in which these questions can unfold,” he said. It’s the kind of ambition that only really becomes possible once a composer has built the vocabulary and the ensemble to carry it — and Hoffmann has spent the better part of five years doing exactly that.

He’s clearly aware of what the recording process asks of everyone involved. “You spend months — or in some cases years — working on these compositions in isolation, and then suddenly they’re brought to life by eighteen incredible musicians in the same room,” he said. “That’s always one of the most rewarding moments of the entire project.” For now, the music is out with the players, the logistics are sorted, and Hoffmann’s attention has narrowed to the scores themselves — studying them as both conductor and composer ahead of a week that, in his words, he wants to spend focused entirely on the music once the red light comes on.

Hoffmann is no stranger to these pages, and given the trajectory of his last three Mons releases, Third Space is one worth watching for when it eventually surfaces. In the meantime, Retrospective is very much worth a revisit — and you can hear it today, with the reissue featured on our New Jazz Releases Spotify playlist.

New Release Spotify Playlist

The Jazz In Europe New Release playlist features tracks from the new releases reviewed on Jazz In Europe. Updated weekly, it is the best place to discover music selected by our editors — not algorithms. Follow the playlist to keep up with the kind of records we believe deserve attention and to stay ahead of the curve.