Kenji Herbert is a Vienna-based guitarist, composer and improvising musician. With an upbringing in Osaka & Kobe Japan, and a decade spent at the pulsing heartbeat of the creative music scene in Brooklyn, New York, his versatile and individual sound is similarly at home in a wide range of musical contexts.
Currently he leads a trio featuring Vinicius Cajado and Lukas König, with their album “Herbert/Cajado/König” to be released in November 2024 through Unit Records. Prior releases under his own name include “As if For Now” (Urchin Records, 2021), “The Way the Light Falls” (Inner Circle Music, 2016) and Superluminal (2012). He is a duo partner to Christian Li as documented on “Li/Herbert”, Vinicius Cajado on “Uni” and Yusuke Yamamoto on “Ambient Works.” He co-leads The Scruffy Herberts with his uncle Peter Herbert and is a member of Herbert/Waelti/Des, Andras Des Quartet, Matthew Halpin Group, Jure Pukl’s Junk Food, Susanna Gartmayer’s Sugar 6TTT, Georgia Weber’s Sleeved Hearts and has worked closely with Arooj Aftab, Yuhan Su, Songyi Jeon and Zack Nestel-Patt among many others. Along with Keisuke Matsuno, he was the subject of Misaki Matsui’s 2017 documentary “mit Kenji & Keisuke -Brooklyn, New York-“
Herbert received his formal education at the Music Academy in Basel, Switzerland (2006-2008) where he studied with Wolfgang Muthspiel and graduated from Berklee College of Music (2009-2011), where he was mentored by Mick Goodrick and David Tronzo. He was an inaugural member of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute under the artistic direction of Danilo Perez.