Homage à Charles Mingus by Peter Herbert
In ’78 I bought my first fake book. ‘Fables of Faubus’ was one of the first tunes I came across. ’79 Mingus died. I never saw him live. During my New York years I heard countless stories from fellow musicians who performed with him. This unsung hero became one of my biggest inspirations over the years. I experimented with scordatura and came up with ‘my’ Mingus tuning, E-A-eb-ab, which gives the bass a ‘major’ flavor, a quite fitting color for this giant of music.
Peter Herbert
The double bass player and composer Peter Herbert plays an average of 100 concerts a year with about 100,000 miles of annual travelling distance. Besides performing solo concerts, he maintains duos with David Tronzo or Carol Robinson, just to name a few. His musical focus in Vienna includes collaborations with the Koehne Quartet or with the cello quartet eXtracello. Much in demand as a sideman, he has collaborated with diverse jazz musicians, which has been well documented on over 150 CD recordings. Peter Herbert is also a versatile composer with works for various orchestras and chamber groups. He established his own Internet-based label Aziza Music in 1999. In his native Austria he received the Hans Koller Prize (musician of the year) in 2001. Herbert has been teaching bass, improvisation and composition at the Anton Bruckner University in Linz since 2007.