Peter Bodge lived a vibrant life of creativity and curiosity. Educator, visual artist, self-taught drummer and jazz historian, exuberant lifelong learner. The Artful Bodger.

After earning a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Hampshire, he served in the US Army, worked as a labor organizer, and then spent the better part of five decades as an educator, primarily teaching art in middle and high schools in California and Massachusetts. His classrooms were hubs of artistic expression and a safe haven for students who needed one. Peter also taught art history and jazz history to adults, art for non-artists, and creative thinking to educators. In the midst of which, he earned a Master’s degree at Cambridge College.

Jazz was a lifelong passion. As a child, inspired by his father, Peter taught himself to play drums and into his 70s, he moonlighted as a professional musician on the New England jazz circuit. As a visual artist, his work focused on his jazz heroes, from Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington to Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy. His linoleum prints featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and seven portraits are housed in the National Museum of American History, in Washington, DC. A testament to his unique and compelling vision.

Peter’s connection to Montclair goes back nearly two decades, when his daughter and her family moved here. He hosted monthly listening sessions at the Montclair Public Library (MPL) for the arts nonprofit Seed Artists, created stunning artwork for their jazz festivals, and inspired Seed’s art programming for kids at the MPL. His donation of more than 600 jazz books establishes a permanent and free public resource, extends his legacy as an educator, and provides a platform for future jazz programming, from concerts to film screenings and projects for kids.

Peter died on September 5, 2025, age 87, at the hospital in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he was born.

Seed Artists creates adventurous music and arts programming that enriches and broadens the cultural fabric, inspires the next generation, and builds community through collaboration. We seek to take people to places they didn’t know they wanted to go. Over the last decade, that has included concerts and music festivals, listening sessions, film screenings, lectures, and children’s art programming, from instrument-making and storybuilding camps to a surprise concert in the halls of an elementary school and a human-art parade.

Many of those events took place at the Montclair Public Library (MPL), with whom Seed Artists began to partner in 2015. In 2019, Seed and the MPL inducted the nation’s first Jazz Laureate, the groundbreaking modern drummer Andrew Cyrille. Montclair has long been a “jazz town,” home to a remarkable number of important musicians and in recent years to the Montclair Jazz Festival. Seed Artists believes deeply in the public library as a free resource for not just books but for educational and cultural programming.