John Seppala

About John

A lifetime at the keys

Born in Cleveland in 1961, John moved to Walnut Creek, California in 1966. He started his professional career at age 10, forming a band with classmates after just two years of piano lessons, and music never let go of him after that. As a kid, he’d put on a record of whatever he wanted to learn, run to the piano, then run back to rewind it and try again — again and again, until he’d worked it out by ear. His piano teacher, Edith Hamaker, watched him outgrow what she could teach him and enrolled him in college‑level theory classes at Diablo Valley College which he took throughout highschool, while also earning himself a seat in California’s All‑State Honor Jazz Band. Chick Corea became his hero, and he spent long stretches of his teenage years transcribing Return to Forever solos note for note — an obsession with those impossibly fast, harmonically dense lines that shaped his playing for the rest of his life.

A summer scholarship took him to Berklee College of Music in Boston while he was still in high school, and he later returned to enroll as an undergraduate, where at nineteen he wrote and recorded an intricate fusion piece with fellow students Rodney Smith and Dave Fields, performing under the band name “The Juice.” True to form, he didn’t finish the degree — he was convinced that dropping out was simply what successful musicians did, and to his parents’ dismay, he left to forge his own path. He spent the rest of his life proving it could work: composer, arranger, piano teacher, session player, and constantly working musician, gigging everywhere from neighborhood lounges to the Montreal Jazz Festival, with music as his only paycheck. He recorded two albums of his own compositions, Axiom and Aire — dense with unusual harmony, imaginative structure, and solos that still stop other musicians cold.

He also appeared on countless recordings for other artists, and kept remarkable company along the way: long professional associations with R&B singer Lenny Williams and guitarist Stef Burns, studio work with producer Arif Mardin, and stages and sessions shared with Chaka Khan, Snoop Dogg, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Kirk Whalum, among many others. His playing earned him a Bill Evans Jazz Piano Scholarship, a Berklee Faculty Award, and a Billboard Songwriter’s Award.

John set a standard for himself that few could touch: flawless technique over the hardest changes, perfect pitch, and a fluency in harmony that let him hear exactly what was wrong in a room and say so. He held everyone around him to that same standard, in rehearsals and studio sessions alike, and he was not shy about it — friends still do the impression, raising their voice to declare, “THAT IS INCORRECT!” But it came from the same place as his old habit of setting impossible goals for his teenage bandmates: he pushed people because he believed they could meet him there, and more often than not, they did. It’s why, difficult as he could be, he was so deeply loved.

John passed away on January 14, 2013, at fifty‑one. On April 7, 2013, the musicians whose lives he’d touched packed the Empress Theatre for a benefit concert that ran deep into the night — music and stories, one after another, a plain measure of how much he meant to the people who knew him. People still talk about him: the parts of his music nobody else can quite play, the sessions they miss, the sound of him telling them they’d gotten it wrong. This site — the recordings, the photos, the memories gathered here — is one more way of keeping that alive.