Bob Sedergreen

Bob Sedergreen (born 1943) is an Australian jazz pianist. Sedergreen has had a long and distinguished career as a performer, bandleader and educator. He has collaborated with leading Australian artists, including John Sangster, Don Burrows, and Brian Brown, and supported some of the biggest names in jazz, including Nat Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie and Milt Jackson.

Sedergreen was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1943 to Seamus "Jim" Sedergreen, a British Warrant Officer First Class, and Leah Erlichman, a milliner. In 1947, the British government sent the P&O steam ship Otranto to evacuate all British families, as the British Mandate was coming to an end and Palestine would finally become Israel. Bob, together with his mother, and his sisters Joyce and Millie, settled in London and his father followed in 1948. Bob moved to Australia in November 1951, where he lived in Melbourne and briefly attended Armadale State School before transferring to Haileybury College, a Presbyterian school for boys.

Bob played with the Fred Bradshaw Quartet (1962–70), Ted Vining Trio (1971–2007), Alan Lee's Plant (1973), Brian Brown's Quintet (1974) and Brian Brown's Quartet (1977–79). In the 1980s, he worked with the Australian Jazz Ensemble, Onaje and Peter Gaudion's Blues Express and the popular Blues on the Boil.

Bob has toured extensively both around Australia and overseas, including Montreal, Malaysia and Europe. He has been advisor to the Montsalvat International Jazz Festival and involved in the introduction of new talent as well as negotiating and supervising the Nat Adderley Quintet and the McCoy Tyner Trio.

As an educator, Bob has lectured at the Victorian College of the Arts and the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Music. He has also been an artist-in-residence at many Victorian secondary schools.

To play with Bob Sedergreen has been described as the "ultimate armchair ride".

Pianist Steve Sedergreen and saxophonist Mal Sedergreen are Bob’s sons.

Sedergreen began hourly sets in Melbourne, Australia, in 2007, where he has taken to narration while performing the music of his life, taking time for comments, while still playing in chronological order to entertain the public in a one-man jazz show, called, "Hear Me Talking to Ya". Named after a Nat and Cannonball Adderley tune, and compared to "sitting on a bar stool, hearing a lifetime of jazz stories, Sedergreen's new show has been compared to 'sitting next to Bob on a bar stool hearing a lifetime of jazz stories'.

Similar to a "virtual music book", reviewers continue to take his audience through the progression of his life as a pianist, using wit and his fifty years of experience as a jazz performer to entertain.

• 2008, recipient of the Don Banks Music Award, Australia's most valuable individual music prize.
• 2006, awarded the Kenneth Myers Medallion for contributions to the arts, the first musician to receive the award.
• 1990, won the Inaugural Jazz Award for Australia's Best Keyboardist.

• 'Sedergreen Wins Don Banks Award', Jazz Australia
• ^ "Jazz Legend wins Don Banks Award". Resonate Magazine. Australian Music Centre Ltd. Retrieved 23 September 2016. 

Sedergreen has recorded twenty solo albums, produced three cassettes, and shared many anecdotes in his autobiography Hear Me Talking to Ya.

Solo

• Deepest Green (2011)

Duet

• Unanimity — Tony Gould and Bob Sedergeen (1995, Move Records)
• Bourbon St to Brunswick St — Bob Sedergreen and Adam Rudegeair (2015)

Ted Vining Trio

• The Ted Vining Trio Live at PBS FM 1981 (1982, Newmarket Music)
• For Elvin… (2004, Move Records)
• Our Favourite Things (2015, Move Records)

Rosa–Holbert–Sedergreen

• The First One (2002)

As sideman

• Bossa Eyes — Emma Sidney (2011, Move Records)
• Points in Time — Steve Sedergreen (2012, Newmarket Music)
• Three Dimensions of Love — Julie Bailey (2013)
• Empathy — Blow (2013)
• Valley Road — Geoff Kluke with More Changes (2015)

• Kaye, Lorien (2007-05-18). "Hear Me Talking to Ya book review". The Age. Fairfax. Retrieved 2016-09-29. 
• "Hear Me Talking to Ya by Bob Sedergreen" (PDF) (Press release). Australia: Melbourne Books. 2007. Archived from the original (pdf) on 2010-09-20. Retrieved 2010-11-14.