Rob Schneiderman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, raised in California, and has resided in New York City for over 30 years. His Jazz career began in San Diego playing piano for visiting soloists such as Eddie Harris, Sonny Stitt, Harold Land and Charles McPherson. A move to New York in 1982 led to performing and touring experience with the likes of J.J. Johnson, Chet Baker, James Moody, Art Farmer and Clifford Jordan, including trips to Europe and Japan. A performance fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts featured Rob with George Coleman, Jimmy Heath, Claudio Roditi, and Slide Hampton. The collaboration with Slide resulted in the CD New Outlook, the first of Rob’s ten recordings as a leader for the Reservoir Music label. These CD’s contain over twenty Schneiderman originals as well as arrangements of many standards. Among the sidemen featured on these dates are Charles McPherson, Billy Higgins, Rufus Reid, Brian Lynch, Ralph Moore, Peter Washington, Lewis Nash, Akira Tana, Billy Hart, Gary Smulyan and Ben Riley. Rob’s Reservoir CD Keepin’ in the Groove received 4 ½ stars (out of five) from Down Beat magazine. Rob’s recordings as a sideman include sessions with Eddie Harris, J.J. Johnson, TanaReid and Brian Lynch’s Unsung Heroes project.
Rob’s latest recording as a leader, Tone Twister, was released in Fall of 2017 on Brian Lynch’s Hollistic MusicWorks label. Along with Rob’s piano, Tone Twister features Brian Lynch on trumpet, Ralph Moore on saxophone, Gerald Cannon on bass and Pete Van Nostrand on drums, playing eight original compositions and an arrangement of Irving Gordon’s classic Unforgettable.
As a Jazz educator, Rob has been on the Stanford Jazz Workshop faculty and has taught as an adjunct professor in the Jazz departments of both William Paterson University NJ (with Rufus Reid) and Queens College NY (with Jimmy Heath), in addition to giving numerous clinics around the country and teaching many students privately. He has also been on the faculty of The Jazz School in Berkeley (now part of the California Jazz Conservatory).
In May 2001 Rob received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. After stints at the Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in Bonn as a National Science Foundation Post Doctoral Fellow, NYU’s Courant Institute, and UPenn, Rob is currently on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at Lehman College, City University of New York. His area of research is Geometric Topology and his work focuses on surfaces in 4-dimensional manifolds and 3-dimensional knot theory.