Christopher Andrew Hoffman was born on June 26, 1978 in Park Ridge, Illinois, and started the cello at five in a Suzuki program. Music was a family business of an unusual kind: his father was a jazz drummer, as was his older brother Bill, and by middle school Hoffman had become obsessed with the drums himself before concluding he was the better cellist and going back. The turn away from a conservatory career came in two steps. In high school he found Oscar Pettiford, the bassist whose pizzicato cello records are the starting point of the whole jazz cello line. Then, watching Erik Friedlander play at the Lawrence Conservatory in Appleton, Wisconsin, he heard what an improvising cellist could sound like at full stretch. He wrote to Friedlander afterwards, and Friedlander pointed him toward Hank Roberts. He played the standard concerto repertoire through college and decided, while doing it, that he did not want an orchestra chair.

His first decade in New York looks nothing like a jazz apprenticeship. In 2006 he joined Michael Pitt's rock band Pagoda; in 2007 he formed Slow To Wake with EJ Fry and Geoff Kreally; in 2008 he made The Other with his brothers Ian and Dylan under the name Needers & Givers. For the end credits of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island in 2010 he arranged and multi-tracked a cello version of Mahler's A minor piano quartet. His own records began in parallel and stayed small: Iosono, eleven pieces issued in 2007, and Induction, a four-song vinyl EP released in March 2011 on hundred pockets records, a collective label he helped start, with Frank LoCrasto on piano, Rob Burger on organ, Ryan Scott on electric guitar, Christina Courtin on violin and Bill Campbell on drums.

The association that made his name began with a single phone call. In 2007 or 2008 Henry Threadgill hired him for one concert at the Museum of Modern Art, scored for three cellos, Jose Davila's tuba and Elliot Humberto Kavee's drums, on what Hoffman believes was Friedlander's recommendation. He heard nothing for a couple of years, then Threadgill called back to ask whether he was still playing, and invited him to rehearse. That was the start of Zooid. Hoffman's cello is on eight Threadgill records across four different ensembles: the Zooid albums Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp (Pi, 2012, cut at Brooklyn Recording in December 2011), In for a Penny, In for a Pound (Pi, 2015), Poof (Pi, 2021) and Cut You Where You Was (Pi, 2026); Ensemble Double Up's Old Locks and Irregular Verbs (Pi, 2016), an elegy for Butch Morris with Jason Moran and David Virelles at the two pianos; the 14 or 15 Kestra: Agg large-ensemble record Dirt... And More Dirt (Pi, 2018); and Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus (Pi, 2018). In for a Penny, In for a Pound, recorded in Brooklyn on December 8 and 9, 2014, won Threadgill the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Hoffman later produced, mixed and mastered Threadgill's Listen Ship (Pi, 2025), a record he does not play on.

His own leader catalogue restarted in 2016 and has grown steadily harder to categorize. Silver Cord Quintet (Asclepius, October 2016) put him in front of Tony Malaby's saxophones, Ben Gerstein's trombone, Kris Davis's piano and Craig Weinrib's drums. MULTIFARIAM (Asclepius, November 2018) is a sixteen-piece cycle with Malaby, Courtin and Gerald Cleaver. Asp Nimbus, issued on Out Of Your Head Records in March 2021 in an edition of two hundred LPs, is the record that got general attention: a quartet of cello, Bryan Carrott's vibraphone, Rashaan Carter's bass and Weinrib's drums, with David Virelles guesting on piano on "Dylan George." Writing in The New York Times, Giovanni Russonello described the quartet as unruly and unorthodox, moving with loose limbs but holding together. Vision Is The Identity (Out Of Your Head, March 22, 2024) was written during the pandemic straight into Pro Tools, with Hoffman handling drum programming and synthesizers over Bill Campbell's live kit and LoCrasto's keyboards, and guest turns from Threadgill on "What Comes," Anna Webber on "Better & Better" and Alfredo Colón on "Farewell Forever." Bandcamp named it one of the best jazz albums of 2024 and DownBeat gave it four stars. REX (Out Of Your Head, January 16, 2026) is a solo record for acoustic and electric cello, thirteen pieces written while he was living in the former house of Rex Brasher, the self-taught painter who made more than 1,200 watercolours of North American birds.

Alongside all of that he has become one of the more widely hired cellists in New York creative music. He plays the cello chair in James Brandon Lewis's Red Lily Quintet on Jesup Wagon (Tao Forms, 2021), the George Washington Carver tribute The New York Times named its jazz album of the year, and on For Mahalia, With Love (Tao Forms, 2023), alongside William Parker, Kirk Knuffke and Chad Taylor; he is also a third of the James Brandon Lewis Trio on Eye of I (Anti-, 2023), where he plays cello through pedals and loops and mixed and mastered the record. He guested on five pieces of Andy Milne and Dapp Theory's The Seasons of Being (Sunnyside, 2018), which won the 2019 Juno Award for Jazz Album of the Year, and took the cello chair in Anna Webber's octet on Clockwise (Pi, 2019). He plays on Michael Blake's Chroma Nova record Dance of the Mystic Bliss (2023), on two pieces of Marc Ribot's Map of a Blue City (New West, 2025), on Tony Malaby's Tubacello date Scorpion Eater (Clean Feed, 2014), on Michaël Attias's LuMiSong (Out Of Your Head, 2024) and on Kenny Warren's Sweet World (Out Of Your Head, 2024), where he also co-wrote three pieces. He has worked with Lee Konitz, Ravi Coltrane, Butch Morris, Rudy Royston's Flatbed Buggy, Darius Jones and Jeremiah Cymerman, and outside jazz with Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithfull, Iron & Wine, Ryan Adams and Bleachers. His own experimental rock band, Company of Selves, released Butterfly Handlers & Memory Travelers on Fleeting Youth Records in 2016.

He joined the Anat Cohen Tentet for its second album, Triple Helix, taking the cello chair from Rubin Kodheli, who had held it on Happy Song. The record was made at Sear Sound in New York in January 2019, mastered at Battery Mastering that April and released on Anzic on June 14, 2019, and it was nominated for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 62nd Grammy Awards. Its title piece is a three-movement suite commissioned by Carnegie Hall and Chicago's Symphony Center, and the band around him was Oded Lev-Ari as music director, Nadje Noordhuis on trumpet and flugelhorn, Nick Finzer on trombone, Owen Broder on baritone saxophone and bass clarinet, James Shipp on vibraphone and percussion, Vitor Gonçalves on piano and accordion, Sheryl Bailey on guitar, Tal Mashiach on bass and Anthony Pinciotti on drums. Hoffman also works constantly on the other side of the glass, mixing and mastering for Pi Recordings, Out Of Your Head, Relative Pitch and NoBusiness from his studio in Bushwick, and he has directed music videos and two short films, "Your Dog Likes Me More Than You" (2020) and "Salamander" (2024).

Hoffman belongs to the generation of cellists who took the instrument's classical technique seriously and then refused the settings it was built for. His lineage runs through the pizzicato jazz cello of Oscar Pettiford, the arco playing Ron Carter put on Where? and on Eric Dolphy's Out There in 1961, Dave Holland's solo Life Cycle, and then Erik Friedlander, Hank Roberts and Abdul Wadud, whom he names as the players who made the path visible; he places himself alongside Okkyung Lee, Tomeka Reid and Rubin Kodheli in the crowd of improvising cellists that arrived in the 2000s. What separates him is the pedalboard. He routes the cello through effects until it shreds like an electric guitar in one register and sits like a bass guitar in another, and on Vision Is The Identity he layered that over his own drum programming, which is why the record was read by some listeners as electronic and by others as punk. He composes at the piano, working out the harmony first and deriving the rhythm and the counter-lines from it, and the one piece on that album written outside the process, "Cloudbuster," began from a bass line instead. He is relaxed about where the results get filed: The New York Times listed Threadgill's The Other One, a record he plays on, among the best classical albums of 2023, and he has said plainly that genres are marketing categories rather than musical ones. Working inside Zooid changed his playing most, by his own account: Threadgill's intervallic system would not accept the scale vocabulary he arrived with, and having to abandon it opened up material he now uses in ordinary harmony as well.