Joe Hertenstein was raised in Germany as the son of a Black Forest lumber jack and boar hunter, spending his childhood carving woods and horns into drumsticks and assembling his first drum set of pots ‚n’ pans ‚n’ boar skulls on the back of a dis-functioned pick-up truck that served as his childhood-refuge. By age 16 he had hit the timpani on all nine Beethoven symphonies and grew bored of all the ‚tacet’. Looking for more involvement, making his ways through cover-, punk- and doom-core bands, at age 19 a Charlie Parker bootleg cassette left him so confused, that he dropped everything to study freedom and ultimate creativity in music. His mission remains to learn from and explore music with (m)any master musician(s), some of which he calls friends and colleagues by now. He hopes to encourage and experience the dialogue with all cultures through music, through the abstract, through friendship and inspiration. Joe is a thalassophile and devides his time between Berlin, Lahr, Cologne, and Brooklyn.
