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Holly Hofmann spent evenings at age five playing a flutophone with her father, a jazz guitarist, on standards from the Great American Songbook. It was an auspicious beginning for the woman who, after years of studying classical music would find satisfying partnerships with renowned jazzmen Ray Brown, Frank Wess, Cedar Walton, Kenny Barron and many of other top names in the music.

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Jazz Journalists of America Jazz Hero Award
Jazz Journalists of America present Jazz Hero award to Holly Hofmann in April 28, 2019. Mayor Kevin Faulkner proclaims April 28 as Holly Hofmann day in the city of San Diego, California

Known internationally since the late 1980s as one of the leading flutists in jazz, Holly Hofmann’s musical career has included associations with legendary artists such as Ray Brown, Frank Wess, Cedar Walton, and Kenny Barron, as well as a string of 13 critically-acclaimed CDs as a leader with band members such as Terell Stafford, Anthony Wilson, John Clayton, Jeff Hamilton, and her husband, pianist Mike Wofford. Originally from the Midwest with degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music and the University of Northern Colorado, Holly settled in San Diego in the late 1980s. In addition to her active career as a performer, she has run a regular concert series in San Diego almost continuously for the past 30 years, a significant feat in a town that has proven challenging for jazz. She began with the four-night-a-week jazz program at the Horton Grand Hotel, which she ran for seven years, presenting hundreds of nationally acclaimed artists including Diana Krall, Benny Carter, Tommy Flanagan, and Joe Henderson. After a brief period of relocating the program to the Bristol Court Hotel (also in downtown San Diego) Holly began an association with the San Diego Museum of Art, presenting concerts to packed audiences in the museum’s auditorium from 2002 to 2010. She then moved the program to the 750-seat North Park Theater, presenting monthly events there from 2010-2013. Her current weekly jazz program, The Sunday Sessions at the Handlery Hotel in Mission Valley regularly attracts crowds that are SRO. Jazz lovers in San Diego are forever in Holly’s debt for these hundreds of concert presentations that introduced our area to some of the leading artists in jazz, and she has additionally has a similar impact on the community of Newport, Oregon, where she has acted as musical director of the Oregon Coast Jazz Party since 2008. Not content with being a performing artist and director of these many musical series, Holly has also been very active as a jazz educator, passing along her knowledge to hundreds of students in clinics at colleges and conferences internationally as well as through her role as a founding member of the faculty of the UC San Diego Jazz Camp. She has given particular focus to mentoring and encouraging young women, particularly women instrumentalists, to become involved in jazz. In sum, for all of the above reasons, Holly has more than earned the title of Jazz Hero both in the jazz community here in San Diego and across the country.