Bill Cunliffe

Professor of Music Bill Cunliffe is a jazz pianist, composer and Grammy Award-winning arranger, renowned for his inventive blending of jazz with classical and pop idioms. As a solo artist and bandleader, Cunliffe has more than a dozen albums to his name, and he appears on numerous other recordings as producer, collaborator and sideman.

Cunliffe grew up in Andover, Mass., steeped in classical piano, falling for jazz as a college undergrad. At Duke University, he studied with the legendary Mary Lou Williams. At the Eastman School of Music, he studied jazz piano with Bill Dobbins and arranging with Rayburn Wright. Cunliffe won the Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition in 1989.

He began his career as pianist and arranger with the Buddy Rich Big Band and worked with Frank Sinatra, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Benny Golson and James Moody. Later he toured and recorded with the Clayton Brothers and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. Longtime associations include the likes of Golson, bassist John Clayton, saxophonists Jeff Clayton and Dick Oatts, drummers Joe La Barbera and Lewis Nash and trumpeter Terell Stafford.

As guest artist with symphony orchestras, Cunliffe has performed his own arrangements of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Concerto in F. He also appears with his trio; his big band; his Latin band, Imaginación; and Trimotif, his classical/improvisational chamber ensemble.

Cunliffe’s trio CD “Sunrise Over Molokai” reached No. 6 in the JazzWeek nationwide radio polls in early 2020. Other recent releases by Cunliffe include “Cabin in the Sky” (2018), with jazz harmonica virtuoso Hendrik Meurkens, and “BACHanalia” (2017), his big-band interpretation of classical masterpieces. For Cal State Fullerton, he produced “Sabor!” (2014), featuring the school’s Fullerton Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Big Band, Latin Ensemble and Quarter ’Til sextet and guest vocalist Freda Payne, reprising her 1970s pop hit “Band of Gold.”

Nurturing a love of choral music, Cunliffe recorded his jazz-inflected sacred compositions (“Transformation,” 2008) with the choirs of All Saints Church in Pasadena, where he is composer-in-residence and a coordinator of the jazz vespers series.

The multifaceted artist wrote the score for “On the Shoulders of Giants,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s 2011 documentary about the trailblazing Harlem Rens basketball team of the 1930s. The film received an NAACP Image Award for Best Documentary. Cunliffe received Image Award nominations for Outstanding Album and Outstanding Group or Duo Collaboration. 

Cunliffe’s sheet-music books “Jazz Keyboard Toolbox” and “Jazz Inventions for Keyboard” (Alfred Music Publishing, 2000 and 2005, respectively) are standard jazz reference works. Other publications include his “Uniquely Familiar: Standards for Advanced Solo Piano” (Alfred, 2010) and “Uniquely Christmas” (Alfred, 2012), transcriptions of tunes from his CD “That Time of Year.”

Cunliffe received the Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement for 2009 for “West Side Story Medley,” on the album “Resonance Big Band Plays Tribute to Oscar Peterson.” His four other Grammy nominations include two for Best Instrumental Composition, for his piano concerto “Overture, Waltz and Rondo” (2012), which he performed with the Temple University Symphony Orchestra, and for the trumpet concerto “fourth stream … La Banda” (2010), written for Terell Stafford and the Temple University orchestra. Cunliffe also has received three daytime Emmy nominations.

The Los Angeles Jazz Society honored Cunliffe in 2010 with its Composer/Arranger Award. That year he also was named a Distinguished Faculty Member of CSUF’s College of the Arts.

In addition to teaching full time at the School of Music, Cunliffe is a longtime faculty member of the Skidmore Jazz Institute and the Vail Jazz Workshop. He is co-producer of the jazz festival at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.