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Robert Berg was born on April 7, 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. He started his musical education at the age of six when he began studying classical piano. He began playing the saxophone at the age of thirteen and went on to graduate from Juilliard. He was influenced heavily by the late 1964–67 period of John Coltrane’s music.

A student from the hard bop school, Bob played from 1973 to 1976 with Horace Silver and then from 1977 to 1983 with Cedar Walton. Berg became more widely known through his short period in the Miles Davis band but left the band in 1987 after recording only one album, You’re Under Arrest.

After leaving Davis’s band, Berg released a series of solo albums and performed and recorded frequently in a group co-led with guitarist Mike Stern. On these albums he played a more accessible style of music, mixing funk, jazz and even country music with many other diverse compositional elements to produce albums that were always musical. He often played at the 7th Avenue South NYC club.

He worked with Chick Corea, Steve Gadd and Eddie Gomez in a quartet. Bob’s tenor saxophone sound was a synthesis of rhythm and blues players such as Junior Walker and Arnett Cobb with the lyricism, intellectual freedom and soul of Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson and Coltrane. Over the course of his short career he recorded a dozen albums as a leader and performed sideman duties on another 30 albums with Randy Brecker, Tom Coster, Kenny Drew, Moncef Genoud, Billy Higgins, Dizzy Gillespie, Sam Jones and Wolfgang Muthspiel.

Saxophonist Bob Berg, who was known for his extremely expressive playing and tone, passed away on December 5, 2002 as a result of a traffic accident. His car was struck by a cement truck that slid on the ice in East Hampton, New York while driving near his home with his wife Arja.

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