Ted Hefko

Ted Hefko’s latest album, Down Below, was picked by a poll of Offbeat Magazine writers as one of the 50 best albums of 2021. Ted Hefko and The Thousandaires had the honor of performing at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2022. He continues performing far and wide from New Orleans favorite dive bars, to venues and festivals across the country.

Born in Madison, WI, Ted began writing lyrics in the second grade and picked up the guitar and sax a couple years later. At eighteen, fresh out of high school, he caught a Greyhound bus to the Big Easy to follow his dreams. After earning a degree in Jazz Performance at UNO, honing his chops and gigging around town for a few years, Ted toured nationally with jazz-jam band, Idletime. He also played around town with jazz guitarist Warren Battiste and played saxophone and flute with a wide variety of latin and caribbean bands including styles such as merengue, salsa, cumbia, calypso, reggae, samba, bossa nova and punta both in New Orleans and New York.

He moved to New York City in 2003, and tried his hand at big city life. During his time in New York, Ted played with a wide variety of bands, from traditional jazz groups which included his fellow New Orleans ex patriots, to recording with original rock bands, West African Hi-Life music, wedding and ar mitzvah bands, and jazz combos.

During this time, he started leading his own jazz groups, writing originals and pulling in early influences like the blues, country and folk songs that he loved as a kid. Hefko released his first all-original album in 2009, Egyptland, a collection of scenes and stories set in New Orleans. This was followed by the jazzier and more playful, If I Walked On Water.  A few years later, he and his live band stopped in the Crescent City to record Distillations of The Blues. That stop rekindled his love for New Orleans.

It’s been ten years since he returned to New Orleans, where his odd mix of talents and love of roots music really fit.  For almost three decades, Ted has plied his trade as a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, flutist, vocalist and strummer of guitars, but first and foremost he is a songwriter, rooted in the blues.