OBITUARIES

This folder includes obituaries for jazz musicians or persons of significance to the Australian jazz community, written by several contributors. Click on the INDEX box to access a list of obituaries contained in this folder.

OBITUARY: BOB BERTLES 1939-2024

by Eric Myers

January 18, 2025

Bob Bertles was born in Newcastle on March 3, 1939, and died in Sydney on December 31, 2024. As a child he listened to his parents’ 78 collection hearing the big bands of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. He once said, “From as early as I can remember I wanted to play the clarinet”. His father bought him a clarinet at the age of nine, with Bob teaching himself for the first few years, with the encouragement of his father, who was a Benny Goodman fan. In 2003 Bertles told interviewer John Sharpe: “The hit parade was all Frank Sinatra and Cole Porter songs. I learnt all those songs by playing along with those records. I never had any formal training until we came to Sydney from Maitland in the early fifties, when I was about 12”.  At 12 or 13 he heard the American alto saxophonist Charlie Parker on the Voice of America, which opened up a world of musical possibilities for him.