EVEN heroes stand on the shoulders of giants. The Norwegian double bassist Arild Andersen has been winning admirers worldwide since the 1970s with the full-toned, extraordinarily articulate playing he displayed on a series of albums his quartet recorded for the ECM label.

As a young musician he learned from several exemplars of his chosen instrument, including Gary Peacock, Ron Carter and the tragi-heroic Scott LaFaro. One major figure of the double bass keeps coming back to him, however: Charles Mingus. Andersen was a teenager when he went to see Mingus’s band play in Oslo in 1964. It’s a gig that’s stayed with him, not least because, fifty years on, first Oslo and then London jazz festivals invited him to recreate it.

Later this year Andersen will join the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra in a programme of Mingus’s music, having previously featured live and on disc with the orchestra in a celebration of his long connection with ECM Records. And before that, starting tomorrow, he plays four Scottish concerts with his trio featuring saxophonist Tommy Smith and drummer Paolo Vinaccia, a group where there’s a certain Mingus influence, although audiences might not easily detect it.

“I remember going to see Mingus every night during a residency he played at the Village Vanguard in New York when I was living there in the early 1970s,” says Andersen, who had the thrill of following in Mingus’ footsteps when he took to the same stage that hosted the 1964 Oslo concert in recreating it and when he led his own band at the Town Hall in New York, scene of a legendary Mingus recording.

“There was something they did that intrigued me: the band would be playing really wildly – it was chaos at times actually – but somehow they would land on a cue absolutely together. I wondered how they did this. So I watched them every night and finally I understood what was happening, and I’ve used the same device in bands ever since. Although we’re not quite so chaotic in the trio, we use it there, too, but I’m not going to tell you what it is!”

Andersen went on not only to play on the same stages as Mingus but also to work with three of the musicians in the Mingus band from that 1964 concert – drummer Dannie Richmond, pianist Jaki Byard and saxophonist Clifford Jordan. He has also worked very successfully with another Mingus alumnus, trumpeter Ted Curson, in a career that has seen him play alongside saxophone legends Stan Getz, Johnny Griffin and Dexter Gordon as well as fellow Norwegian, Jan Garbarek.

Playing with Dannie Richmond, who served with Mingus for over twenty years, Andersen realised that he might be closer to Mingus than he’d previously suspected.

“They’re technical points, really, but I noticed several things happening when I was playing with Dannie, especially the way he changed tempo, that were obviously developed during his years with Mingus,” says Andersen. “I must have picked things up without realising it because although I loved Mingus’s music – he was a great composer - I wasn’t aware of listening to him as a direct influence as a bass player.”

This, he says, was partly to do with the records that were available in Norway during the time when he was developing his bass technique. While LaFaro, who died in a car accident aged just twenty-five in 1961, sang out from the recordings he made with pianist Bill Evans and was clearly a virtuoso, the Mingus that Andersen heard early on was possibly restricted, he says, by the disciplines that bebop rhythm sections worked under.

“I remember him being an amazing character onstage on that Oslo concert,” he says. “And then watching him in New York and then seeing the 1964 concert again – it was filmed at the time and has been shown on television quite a few times – I was able to see and hear just what a fantastic bass player he was. He really drove the rhythm but he also played like a horn player in the higher register. I like to do both of those things too.”

The trio with Smith and Vinaccia actually has its roots in Scotland, having formed after the Aberdeen-based Norwegian consulate commissioned Andersen to compose a suite celebrating the centenary of Norway’s independence from Sweden in 2005. The commission called for a duet and having known Smith since they appeared together on a Channel Four television series recorded in Edinburgh when the saxophonist was a teenager, Andersen thought it would be appropriate to involve a Scottish element.

Oslo-based Vinaccia joined a year or so later and the trio became an instant success, winning enthusiastic reviews worldwide for its debut album, Live at Belleville. A second album, Mira, followed in 2013.

“They’re very different records but they’re two sides of the same group,” he says. “Mira was conceived as a ballads album, quite restrained, and we can play that way in concert as well as playing with the energy you hear on the live album.”

The Arild Andersen Trio plays Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on Thursday; Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, Friday; West Kilbride Village Hall, Saturday; and Inchyra Arts Club, near Perth, Sunday.