I recently had the opportunity to interview drummer Joe Hertenstein about his work. Hertenstein has been working between Berlin and New York for nearly two decades. He is playing a record release concert for FUTURE DRONE at Nublu 151 in New York on Wednesday at 7 pm, where he will be joined by Jon Irabagon and Anthony Coleman. Check out his latest. In this interview, we talked extensively about his earlier years and how he got to this point in his career.

How did you get started playing drums?

I didn’t chose to play the drums conciously. My mum used to play accordion/piano as a hobby. One of her best friends is an opera singer and music teacher in our home town in Germany’s Black Forest region. At age four my mum signed me up with her friend’s weekly kids music program, where we sang nursery rhymes and threw triangles across the room. At age six she suggested I should choose an instrument and start private lessons. Since I couldn’t sit still and was already hammering dents into my furniture, they agreed that I should try drums for starters. Well, that worked out. I started weekly lessons, became a good reader and the drummer in different ensembles of the city music school including the symphony (as a teenager I hit the timpani on all nine Beethoven symphonies including his violin concerto), the symphonic brass orchestra with commissioned pieces, with which we toured Europe a bunch during school vacations, the percussion ensemble with original literature, which gave me an early glimpse into the option that one doesn’t only have to interpret dead composers. I sang in choirs, I played kit in pop/rock/punk/cover bands. At 15 I started getting paid for gigs, at 16 I began teaching drums for money, and when orchestra friends a couple years older than me told me they were preparing to audition to study music at a conservatory, I learned that music is something to do as a “career.” Then an older musician friend took me to a festival in Freiburg to see Colosseum with Jon Hiseman. Another took me to the legendary Frankurt Musik Messe, the back-then second biggest fair after NAMM, where I by chance had an on my part fully ignorant but pleasant and lasting conversation with Steve Ferrone, mid ninties that was. I attended drum workshops with Dave Weckl, Jonathan Phillip Moffett, Dom Famularo, the usual suspects. May second teacher in Lahr, Charly Lüftner, told me to look for Tommy Baldu in Karlsruhe to take private lessons with. Tommy showed me the Purdie Shuffle and opened a can of worms. One day someone slipped me a bad sounding Charlie Parker bootleg cassette with no information on it. It sounded so weird, only a constant SHHHHHHHH plus tape hiss of a… is that a cymbal? And a saxophone with endless doodledoodledoodle, bass was inaudible, but it was so intriguing. So that’s Jazz!? The little money I had I spent at used-CD-stores and built a CD and miniDisk collection. With my best friend Jürgen I smoked and drank and we listened endless nights exploring the ever expanding music-rabbit hole. Since you couldn’t find much Jazz on the streets of the Black Forest the idea formed to audition for a college Jazz program.

And what led you to improvisation as a form of expression?

Having had enough of sitting in orchestra pits when the 2nd movement was tacet (no percussion at all), and the 3rd beginning with 382 bars of Andante-nothing to finally play one phrase and a crescendo roll on the timpani, and eight minutes later a carefully balanced triangle roll, I knew I’d always love the classical canon but man, I wanna hit! I wanna play! I was bored, wanted more. What is Jazz? And Funk? And Afrobeats and Clavés? What’s the Blues? What do they mean, when they say, “He plays a mean Shuffle?” Could I ever learn to swing? My bridges were Blood, Sweat n Tears to Mike Stern, Hendix, then we wore out the Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard box set. Through Michael Brecker to Jack deJohnette to Miles-everything, HardBop to BeBop – kinda backwards until I understood this bootleg cassette…back up to Interstellar Space…and I practised a ton. Looking for this thing called Jazz I moved from Karlsruhe to Munich to Rotterdam to Berlin just looking to play. Spent many a night at all the local jam sessions without knowing the standards repertoire, the forms, waited patiently until they’d let me play one ballad at the end of the night, had eyes rolled on me, got dissed and kicked off stage…I didn’t care, I was there to learn.  Seeing Brötzmann with Graves at the Berlin Jazzfest probably in 2000 had a deep impact on me. Not only musically.

Who was integral to you getting your bearings as a musician?

I auditioned in Munich to study jazz drums and didn’t get in, got accepted in Rotterdam, moved abroad, practiced until calluses and still got kicked out of the college after the first year! I had no idea or concept, totally naive, coming from the classical world of a small German town I had to fully reprogram everything I thought I knew about life and music making: Music happens off the page! I freelanced in Berlin for a year working at a drum store, hung at sessions four/five nights a week, played jazz gigs, function gigs, practiced a lot, did my first recordings. Got accepted by Keith Copeland in Cologne, which felt like arriving, finally. Keith was a true mentor who took me under his wing, incredible! My first time playing the MOERS Festival was in 2005 with Cologne’s James Choice Orchestra through the mentorship of Frank Gratkowski, the recording of which became my first release on Leo Records in 2007. Diploma was 2006, while Keith pushed me to apply for this German governmental scholarship “DAAD” for a Masters degree in NYC. I was never in NY before and then just moved there. Completed the degree at Queens College with Gene Jackson, Sam Ulano, Michael Mossman. When you ask me who my northern and southern stars are: Milford Graves, Elvin Jones, Jack DeJohnette, Andrew Cyrille, Paul Motian, Paul Lovens, the mystery-drummers with their “alien time” that are hard to impossible to transcribe, where rhythm is pure feeling, and abstraction the truth. If we wanna talk backbeats, couple years ago I got to see Jim Keltner at 83 in Berlin with Bob Dylan, are you kidding me!? I consider myself a Milford Graves-Jim Keltner-kinda guy.

Two of your earlier collaborators were Thomas Heberer and Pascal Niggenkemper. How did you meet them and what brought you together? What did that encounter make possible?

Pascal and I were peers at the college in Cologne, we both received the DAAD-scholarship and moved to NY just one year apart. Thomas and I were members of Cologne’s James Choice Orchester, we moved to NY in 2007 independently from each other. 2008 I spent three weeks at the Banff Workshop in Canada and returned with enough encouragement to actually take my ideas seriously in putting dots on paper. Still quite shy calling my ideas compositions but eager to try them out I fell back on old friends and invited them to a jam session to my Brooklyn apartment. I’m still very grateful that they found ways to make music out of my scribbles. It led to me producing my first album, controlling the whole process, writing and registering the music, finding a label, navigating cover art and linernotes, promoting it, paying for it all, pulling a tour together, planning the next album etc. We released two albums with Cleanfeed Records 2010 (black cover) and 2015  (white cover) called HNH and HNH2, and a quartet album inbetween for Red Toucan Records in 2011 including bass clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst called POLYLEMMA, all recorded live to two track.

When Pascal moved away, he left a void. Thomas and I kept meeting at random gigs all over the city until during the first pandemic lockdown we called in a session with bassist Joe Fonda, which was so healing for all of us, that we called his new trio REMEDY, which quickly became a working band with several tours, four studio albums and one live album under its belt so far. I love this band! We all compose and book. We have our own sound. Our third album we dedicated to Jutta Hipp; our latest album, the first in quartet, features Japanese, Berlin-based pianist Aki Takase, and they are all released with Fundacja Sluchaj Records. They’re all on Bandcamp. The live album we released independently. We’re currently booking an European tour for October 2027.

How did the NYC environment transform your musical involvements?

Around 2008 I threw myself into the scene and quickly became a member of the Nublu Orchestra conducted by Butch Morris, where I met a ton of musicians, from Juini Booth to Graham Haynes, from Kenny Wollesen to Ray Anderson. Until Butch’s passing in 2012, I played almost every Monday with them. Butch was the first bandleader who took me to a festival back to Europe, when we performed at the Warsaw SummerJazzDays at Sala Kongressowa, which was incredible, and it’s such a bummer this concert wasn’t documented!

Over thirteen years I probably played between 200 and 300 gigs just at Nublu, easily. I played at The Stone with Butch, Karl Berger, Adam Rudolph, Hamid Drake, Elliot Sharp, Darius Jones, etc.; at Issue Project Room, Spectrum, Roulette, Abrons Arts Center, ArtForArts, Downtown Musicgallery, iBeam, The Tea Lounge, Shapeshifter Lab, Why Not, The Bushwick Public House, and many more places for experimental and improvised music. Many house concert series, too. I loved my trio with Todd Neufeld & Sean Conly. We recorded an album, which I still want to release some day.

I did many recording sessions with many different bands, worked with Mat Maneri, Matthew Shipp, Daniel Carter, Adam Rudolph, Anthony Coleman, Curtis Fowlkes, James Brandon Lewis, Stephen Gauci. In the bands of Rana Farhan, Blaise Siwula, David Watson, OURIDA, Aron Namenwirth, Sean Sonderegger, Sana Nagano, Harvey Valdes, Mike Irwin, Hans Tammen, Mark Daterman. I played the Vision Festival with Karl Berger’s Orchestra and the Red Hook Jazzfestival with The Welf Dorr Unit. I played in Beacon, Kingston, Newburgh, Hoboken, Woodstock. I toured to Boston, Baltimore, DC, Houston, Memphis, Toronto, London, Rome, Dubai…those were incredible years! For about five years I was the drummer in Tim Hagans’ different ensembles. We played The Kitano, Smalls, Dizzy’s Club; in Texas and Massachussetts; with Rufus Reid, Jay Anderson, Ravi Coltrane, Steve Wilson, Luis Perdomo u.a. Incredible jams were always Elias Meister’s band SPACEPILOT with Leo Genovese, we played a lot in NY, did a couple European tours, and released three LPs. Check those out!

How did the trio with Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp come together? Can you talk about your creative process with that group?

During the peak of my collaboration with Houston-based bassist Thomas Helton, who organized incredible tours and shows in Houston, around Texas, and in NYC, we were The Core Trio with his saxophone buddy Seth Paynter, a very unique player. We featured guests like Robert Boston, Kevin Patton, Matthew Shipp, Steve Swell, Tony Malaby, Tim Hagans and others. We also worked with the Houston dance companies The Michele Brangwen Dance & Music Ensemble and Group Acorde. The Core Trio released a studio and a live album both featuring Matt Shipp. I became friendly with the NY poet Steve Dalachinsky, and it was through Shipp’s recommendation that Ivo invited me to the recording for his trio album SCALENE. The creative process was meeting at Park West Studios, coffee, set-up, and hit. If I recall correctly, the music didn’t even get mixed, just mastered and released within a few months as part of Ivo’s series on Leo Records. It was a hit-and-run. Loved it, the real thing. I think it’s time for another, Ivo!

Since moving back to Berlin, what has changed musically for you and which are your current projects there?

Luckily, I always loved Berlin and my wife and I moved for many reasons. I lived here already for a year in 2000, when a Döner Kebap was 99 Pfennig. Stuff was so cheap, and the jam sessions at A-Trane lasted til 7 in the morning.

Over the years I often visited Berlin on tours, and the Berlin label jazzwerkstatt released my album FUTURE DRONE with Jon Irabagon and Achim Tang back in 2012 – when I introduced Achim to Jon during the MOERS Festival, a friend felt so inspired by the meeting, that he jumped in as producer and the four of us spontaneously drove to Cologne to record at The Loft. This release combined my alma mater, Cologne’s Loft, with my then fifth year as a New Yorker – I love how this aligned. Big shout-out to Dietmar Hagen Horn, the män!

And as I had arrived back to Berlin during the pandemic, I received a call from Ulli Blobel of jazzwerkstatt if I wanted to put a band together with Americans and play a gig? Of course, I said, but it’s lockdown, there’re no gigs anywhere whatsoever. He said, I shouldn’t worry, he gave me a date, a venue, a budget. I called Greg Cohen and Michael Moore, and we did play a concert to a sold-out audience of about 80 people, all masked and tested and socially distanced, during those couple weeks when covid numbers were down and the gov allowed galleries and museums to open at half capacity: We were billed as a “sound installation.” The concert was recorded and mixed by Friedrich Störmer, released on jazzwerkstatt as LIVE DURING LOCKDOWN and was awarded BEST LIVE ALBUM by The NYC Jazz Record 2022.

Soon after, Blobel called again, before he retires he wanted to present his label one last time in NY, if I had any ideas? I connected him to Roulette, he received funding from the Goethe Institute, and in April of 2022 he presented a two night Berlin-festival in Brooklyn with about twenty musicians. My contribution was the record release concert LIVE AFTER LOCKDOWN with Moore & Cohen – performing back in NY this full circle felt like a two-way-homecoming to me. At the same time I felt like a tourist in my own city – something to play about!

For five years now I’m living the other way around and am visiting NY as often as possible and try as good as I can to keep bands going, keep recording and gigging on both scenes, and hold on to my friendships with people I so dearly miss. Life in Berlin is good. Blobel fixed me a tour for my organ trio FUTURE DONE with Jon Irabagon and Anthony Coleman, we played Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Peitz Festival, Unterfahrt, we recorded live for the RBB radio station, and the concert recording Live at Porgy&Bess is my latest release this month on HatHutRecords.

With Sana Nagano’s SMASHING HUMANS we played the MOERS Festival. I could invite Stephen Gauci to his first visit of Berlin, together we produced an album with Alexander von Schlippenbach and Jan Roder, which Gauci released on his label gaucimusic. On and off I get to play with Schlippenbach and Matthias Bauer, which is a dream! Here and there I can call gigs with Toby Delius and Jan Roder: The Great Berlin-Winter-Antidepressant. I toured with Michael Moore and Antonio Borghini, with a live recording ready for release, if anyone’s interested!? I’m working in Peter van Huffel’s band CALLISTO with Lina Allemano and Antonis Anissegos, we released an album on Cleanfeed and did a two week Canadatour last summer. I recorded with Floros Floridis, Thomas Borgmann, Ignaz Schick, Johannes Schleiermacher, Cavana Lee Hampel. In February I got to play my fifth gig with her father, Gunter Hampel, which is also a full circle for a German NYer. On August 31^st I’ll attend his memorial celebration in Berlin. When my project “XCountry Bungalow featuring Daisy Payero” got invited to the MOERS Festival 2024, I could invite NY’s Dafna Naphtali to join us. I love connecting the scenes.

Berlin’s scene is pumping, tons of gigs are happening all the time, festivals, too. Venues are keeping it together. Labels are active. FMP resurrected! Here and there you can fetch a lil press love. The arts funding is substancial although always fought over politically. The scene is totally diverse with people from everywhere. Lots of NYers moved here too or visit frequently. The free scene around the jazzwerkstatt label is very much a beacon of the old GDR legends, who had a deep longing for freedom, their very own reasons to play! What a crazy legacy, insane stories, a history I love learning about more and more. My latest project is a duo with German ex-GDR guitar hero Joe Sachse, called “<<Joe²>> no room for squares.” Generally, Berlin’s energy is a tenth of NY, but still very happening. Economically it’s quite relaxed compared to NY, which I do enjoy.

But the highlight so far was, when Ray Anderson and his booking agent saw my trio with Michael Moore at the Peitz Festival 2023 and suggested if I made it a quartet with Michael Moore and Michael Formanek featuring Ray as special guest he’d book us a tour under my name. Wow, that was a gift, this felt like an answer to the building of my NY-Berlin connection! In October 2024 we played 12 concerts through five European countries: My-almost-All-Stars-Band. From three live recordings I produced the album “The 7th Dinner LIVE” which got mixed and mastered again by the great Friedrich Störmer and released by the fantastic Polish label Fundacja Sluchaj Records (FSR) just last October. The album was nominated for the “Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik” – the German Record Critics’ Award – please check it out via Bandcamp or joehertenstein.com.

Now I’m back in NY for all of September to celebrate the release of my new album of my organ trio FUTURE DONE with Jon Irabagon and Anthony Coleman Live at Porgy & Bess on the Swiss label HatHutRecords, mixed by the great Sam Lazarev at NY’s The Hit Factory. I’m inviting you to three concerts on Wednesday, September 23^rd, 8pm at Nublu at 151 Avenue C, and two concerts on Thursday, September 24^th at 2pm at The National Jazz Museum in Harlem at 58 West 129^th Street and at 7pm at Jazz at the Lodge in Ossining, 118 Croton Ave, Ossining, NY 10562, USA.