Joseph Hébert - choral director, cellist, educator and pastoral music minister performs in the San Francisco area and has toured in Japan, Africa, and Europe as well as throughout the United States. He has shared the concert stage and recording studio with hundreds of artists from the classical and popular music worlds including: Carlos Santana, Stevie Wonder, Placido Domingo, Ray Charles, Jesse Norman, and Marilyn Horne among many others.
Mr. Hébert is the Assistant Principal Cello of the Oakland East Bay Symphony
Joseph Hébert has recently accepted a position as Director of Music Ministry at Corpus Christi Church in Piedmont. Until recently he was the Director of Music Ministry at the Catholic Community of Pleasanton (CCOP), a parish of over 5000 registered families located in the San Francisco Bay Area where he administrated and directed three independent choirs and a cantor ministry totaling over 150 musicians. One of his most notable accomplishments at CCOP is the development of a large Young Adult Choir, the first of its kind in size and ministerial focus within the Diocese of Oakland. After an invitation to perform in Rome, he recently returned with his choirs from a tour of Rome and Assisi Italy where they performed a captivating performance of diverse selections in St Ignatius Church, as well as a special performance for the pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI. Mr. Hébert was especially well received after playing his arrangement of Adoro Te Devote on cello in St Peter’s Basilica during a Mass.
Joseph Hébert served for over 15 years on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley). While at UC Berkeley, he was a ‘cello instructor, conducted the String Orchestra, and directed multiple choruses, with the largest choir consisting of over 100 students, in the Young Musicians Program. The program provides comprehensive music training and scholarships to highly musically gifted disadvantaged Junior High and High School students of the San Francisco Bay Area, many who have become renowned artists in the jazz, contemporary, and classical music genres. As a gifted educator, Mr. Hébert has given lectures and clinics to thousands of elementary through college age students locally and nationally.
Joseph studied music at Stanford University, California State University East Bay (Hayward), the University of California at Berkeley, and studied graduate theology in Pastoral Ministry at Holy Names University in California. He is also a voting member of the Grammy Recording Academy.
Hébert’s solo and improvisational cello talents are featured on hundreds of CD projects including grammy winning Supernatural and Shaman by Carlos Santana. His most recent cello CD’s are entitled On Eagle's Wings and Sanctuary. The reviewer Wind and Wire described Joseph Hébert as “one of the most versatile cellists around…he plays pizzicato on some tracks, making it sound like he is playing bass; then he soars with full-bowed classical treatment.”