Rory Hoffman, the Christian Country Music Association’s Entertainer and Musician of the Year for 2009, will perform with three local guitarists at the Guitar Masters 2010 concerts today and Saturday, Feb. 27, at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City.
Guitar Masters 2010 will feature Hoffman, a blind multi-instrumentalist who lives in Nashville, along with local performers Bruce Neubert, J.D. Fiedler and Brandon Sprague. Each player will perform solo during the concerts, which typically end with an unrehearsed jam session.
Hoffman will perform in Guitar Masters for the first time, and said the audience should expect him to cover a wide swath of musical territory.
“They can expect kind of an eclectic approach. I grew up in country music and Christian music, playing in the family band. We always did Christian and country music. Later on, I got into jazz and blues a lot,” he said.
As a session player in Nashville, Hoffman plays whatever styles he has to, and he intends to bring that diverse skill set to the Dahl, playing three different guitars.
Hoffman was born and raised on a ranch near Lemmon. After attending Northern State University in Aberdeen for two years, he
helped start an independent music production company in Mobridge. He did that until May of 2008, when he decided to move to Nashville.
“I just thought that Nashville had a bit more opportunity for a musician,” he said. His work took him to the city often anyway, and he wanted to see if he could make it in the music business there.
“I finally decided I wanted to test my mettle, basically,” he said. “Do I become an extremely small fish in a big pond, or can I hang?”
In addition to his appearance at Guitar Masters, Hoffman will perform at separate, gospel show on Sunday, Feb. 28, at the Dahl.
“That is going to focus strictly on my Christian music,” he said. “For that show, I’m going to be playing more than guitar.”
The instrumentation will include keyboards, saxophone and harmonica, as well as a few other “surprise instruments that a lot of people have probably never seen before,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman began to discover his musical abilities when he was 4 years old and used an unusual playing style. Because his hands were too small to fit around the neck of the guitar, he laid it across his lap and has played it that way since then. Hoffman now is proficient on 15 instruments and has two CDs. “Blind Faith,” produced in Nashville, is an instrumental CD of well-known Christian hymns arranged in a country/jazz/blues style. “Fishin” contains songs that Hoffman co-wrote.
Neubert started playing guitar when he was 13. Unable to find a suitable instructor, he decided to teach himself and got into his first band, Ulysses, before turning 16. His style is influenced by the guitar greats of the 1970s, including Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. During the Guitar Masters concerts, Neubert explores his softer side along with some searing lead guitar work played to backing tracks. He also played Guitar Masters in 2005.
Neubert has performed continuously in the region for the past three decades. He has toured much of the upper Midwest, performing in bands such as Lonely Mountain, Bold Lightning, Wild Cherry, RPM, The Touch, Freda Fuselage & The Wingwalkers, Radio Flyer, Four Sticks, Riff Raff, The Virgin Alleycats and Thieving Magpies.
Fiedler has performed widely since the early 1960s. He worked in Hollywood for Dick Clark, as well as Monkees producers Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. After serving in Vietnam, he moved to Bismarck, N.D., playing with country-western band Rocky Top. He taught himself to play pedal steel guitar, and in 1979 formed Stampede, a western swing band. Fiedler came to Rapid City in 1980 and has played with many musicians in the Black Hills. He worked with jazz quartet Swing Shift and currently is with the jazz trio Just Friends.
This is the third time Fiedler will perform at Guitar Masters in the 13-year history of the concerts.
Sprague lives in Deadwood and has performed as a professional blues guitarist and vocalist at major venues in Chicago, New Orleans, Houston and Dallas.
He was the opening act on B.B. King’s 2004 tour and has performed with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Eddy Clearwater, Russell Jackson, Indigenous and Jimmy D. Lane. He has opened for Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Little Feat, Chicago, George Thorogood, Big Head Todd & the Monsters, the Doobie Brothers, Edgar Winter, the Georgia Satellites and Joan Jett.
Sprague currently performs with the Brandon Sprague Blues Band regularly at the Deadwood Tobacco Co. in Deadwood. He recorded a CD with the band Shakedown, which received national acclaim in Blues Revue magazine.
For more information on Guitar Masters 2010 or Hoffman’s gospel show, contact Darla Drew Lerdal at 348-7515 or ddrewlerdal@rushmore.com.
Contact Eric Lochridge at 394-8321 or eric.lochridge@rapidcityjournal.com.
