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 Lahr, Cologne, Berlin, and Brooklyn.

Joe has released five albums as a leader with the bands HNH, POLYLEMMA, Future Drone and TØRN and many more as a sideman on labels such as MoersMusic, Cleanfeed, Red Toucan, jazzwerkstatt Berlin, Creative Sources, 2nd Floor/Loft-Cologne, Skirl, Leo, Engine, EvilRabbit, FMR, Chant, Gaucimusic, Konnex, Springstoff, Ravello/PARMA, Meta, muworks, Off, Fundacja Słuchaj.

He has performed at the Philharmonic in Cologne, and at the Moers Festival in Germany, the Warsaw Jazz Summer Days, the Bush Hall London for BBC, the Opera House in Toronto, the World Trade Center in Dubai, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, as well as Carnegie Hall (Weill), Webster Hall, Roulette, Issue Project Room, The Stone, Dizzy's Club, Smalls, Nublu and the Vision Festival in New York City and many others.

In 2005, the magazine AllAboutJazzNewYork hailed his drumming style as "...shaping the music from the bottom up." and for April 2011, the Managing Editor of TheNYCJazzRecord, Laurence Donohue-Greene, selected Joe's album Crespect by TØRN as "Recommended New Release". The same year, the website allaboutjazz.com praised his album POLYLEMMA as thus: "The soloists' focused interactions intimate a highly artistic game plan that supersedes the tried and true." POLYLEMMA won Belgian music critic Stef Gijssels' freejazzblog's Happy-New-Ears-Award 2011 for "most innovative listening experience". Joe’s latest album HNH2 made it on Gijssels’ list of top 10 albums of 2015: “Fantastic trumpet, bass, drums trio redefining the format through inventive music.”

"The ever-inventive drummer Joe Hertenstein is another local hero who pops up in lots of odd places!" (Bruce Lee Gallanter, DowntownMusicGallery)