- When he was ten years old, Bickert started playing a guitar owned by his older brother, and he was soon performing at country dances with his parents.
- As a child, Bickert and his family moved to Vernon, British Columbia where his parents operated a chicken farm and had a small country dance band.
- In his late teens, Bickert worked for a little over a year as a sound engineer at a local radio station near Vernon.
- Bickert played on five Rosemary Clooney albums between 1983 and 1987, and the two recorded nine songs during these years as guitar/vocal duets.
- He received in 1 980 a Juno Award for Best Jazz Recording, Sackville 4005 with Don Thompson.
- In 1952, Bickert decided to move to Toronto with the thought of pursuing music as a career. Once in Toronto, he again took a job as a sound engineer at radio station CFRB to support himself.
- In the winter of 1995, Bickert slipped on some ice and broke bones in both of his arms, which halted his musical activity for a period of months. Then, in 2000, his wife Madeline died, and Bickert decided, at age 67, to retire completely from music.
- By the end of the 1950s, Bickert was regularly working as a studio musician in Toronto, recording on commercial and jazz sessions. Bickert's commercial, radio, and television work increased through the 1960s, though he also continued to play jazz gigs at night.
- His international reputation grew steadily from the mid-1970s onward as he recorded albums both as a bandleader and as a backing musician for Paul Desmond, Rosemary Clooney, and other artists, with whom he toured in North America, Europe and Japan.
- In 1975, Bickert recorded his first solo album, a live trio recording with Don Thompson and Terry Clarke. The same group recorded a studio album in 1976, 'Out of the Past', which was unreleased until 2006.
- During Bickert's career, most of his work was performing as a backing musician in the Toronto area (working in both live appearances and recording studio jobs). While Bickert did regularly record records as a leader or co-leader from 1975 to 1999, he did not pursue a career as a touring bandleader.
- By 1982, Bickert had secured a recorded contract with Concord Jazz, for which he recorded nine albums as a leader or co-leader between 1983 and 1997. Bickert also appeared on the label as a backing musician for artists including Benny Carter, Ken Peplowski, Rob McConnell, Fraser MacPherson, and Rosemary Clooney.
- Bickert's parents were semi-professional musicians, his father playing fiddle and his mother playing piano.
- Bickert worked professionally from the mid-1950s to 2000, mainly in the Toronto area.
- Bickert played and recorded with the group until 1998, appearing on more than 15 of the group's jazz-focused albums, and on most of the group's early commercial sessions as well.
- Bickert was a mainstream jazz musician, specializing in interpreting jazz standards from the Great American Songbook, and instrumentals from the swing era.
- He was Member of the Order of Canada since 1996.
- He was a Canadian guitarist who played mainstream jazz and swing music.
- Bickert was born in the small Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite village of Hochfeld, Manitoba to Harry Bickert, a Russian Mennonite immigrant from Molotschna colony and Helen Dyck of Plum Coulee, Manitoba.
- In the 1990s, the pace of Bickert's recording and performing career began to slow down. He made no albums as a solo leader after 1989's Third Floor Richard, though he continued to record regularly with The Boss Brass, and with groups led by Moe Koffman and Toronto drummer Barry Elmes.
- As his solo jazz career blossomed in the mid-to-late-1970s, Bickert's commercial studio career in Toronto slowed down, which the guitarist attributed to his lack of interest in contemporary pop and rock guitar styles. He called the gradual phase out of his commercial work a "mutual parting", though he continued to take occasional commercial studio jobs when he felt like the music was a good fit for his style of playing.
- Bickert married Madeline Mulholland, a private secretary, in the early 1960s. The couple had four children, and were married until Madeline's death in 2000. One of Bickert's daughters predeceased him in 2013. Bickert died of cancer in 2019.
- Bickert had a reputation for knowing many semi-obscure pop ballads from the 1920s-1950s, and on his own albums, he recorded such examples as "I'll Wait and Pray", "Keeping Myself for You", "I'll Never Stop Loving You", "I Know Why (And So Do You)", and "Maybe You'll Be There".
- Bickert did not typically play music from the modal jazz and jazz fusion styles that were predominant during the height of his career in the 1970s and 1980s.
- Bickert was noteworthy as being one of the few mainstream jazz guitarists in the public eye in the 1970s and 1980s who used a solid-body electric guitar, an instrument primarily associated with rock, soul, blues, country, and jazz fusion styles at the time.
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