Hoffman does have a CD, Works of Larry Hoffman-Contemporary American Music but he produced and paid for it himself in 2011. If you are a contemporary composer and your name is not John Adams or Philip Glass, one of your biggest challenges is to get anyone to record and perform your music. Asked if he is happy with that life, he shoots back an unequivocal one-word response: "Thrilled." Everything in his life is as it is so he can create music. He is now 68 years old and living in a tiny, overstuffed, shabby apartment because he has never made a dime as a composer, and he does not care. He was 10 years old when he discovered he would rather play the ukulele at summer camp than swim with the other kids in an icy lake, and if the great question of human existence is how to live, then Hoffman's great question has been how to live through music. What Bartok and Janáček and Copland did with folk melodies, what Gershwin did with jazz, Hoffman has been doing with the blues, to scant notice. For the last 30 years, he has worked at composing original blues music, not quotes or transpositions, for the classical stage, for string quartets and other chamber ensembles. He has played blues guitar, performed with some of the great old bluesmen, studied the blues with a scholar's rigor, produced blues records, and been nominated for a Grammy for his blues liner notes. All his life, he has been besotted by music, especially one of the two great African-American musical forms, the blues. Larry Hoffman does not mind being teasingly called the blackest white guy in Baltimore.
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