The Cincinnati Jazz Hall of Fame 2020 induction has been postponed until May or June, but the new class is an impressive lineup of local jazz legends. One of those inductees, pianist and Grammy-winning arranger Bill Cunliffe, joins Ron Esposito for a conversation about his music and career.
Read MoreWe spend an hour with Grammy Award winning pianist, composer & arranger Bill Cunliffe. At the time of this program (1994) Bill Cunliffe’s career as a serious jazz musician was beginning to pay dividends. His studies with the great Mary Lou Williams, tours with Buddy Rich, Frank Sinatra, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Joshua Redman & his winning of the 1989 Thelonious Monk Piano Competition all helped in making him a much sought after artist.
We visit this Los Angeles-based musician and sample his 1993 Discovery Records release, A Rare Connection. The CD includes 7 Cunliffe originals & utilizes some of L.A.'s top musicians (Bob Sheppard on tenor and bass clarinet, trumpeter Clay Jenkins, trombonist Bruce Paulson, bassist Dave Carpenter, drummer Peter Erskine, and percussionist Kurt Rasmussen).
Read MoreBy AAJ STAFF
February 29, 2004
Singers are as much a visual experience as they are an auditory experience. I think that is why vocals are popular now.
There is a tendency to be indifferent to the familiar -an absence of appreciation with an assumption of the routine. But there is a wisdom in nothing lasts forever. So perhaps, it would behoove us to be grateful that we have musicians locally like Bill Cunliffe (unedited and in his own words), who too yearns for a renewed sense of community. With harmonic and lyrical sensibilities rivaling certified headliners in celebrated New York, Cunliffe has certainly honored Los Angeles with his loyalty to the belief that jazz in Los Angeles can one day be a palace again.
All About Jazz: Let's start from the beginning.
Bill Cunliffe: My mother was a good pianist and she had a piano at home. My dad played the phonograph all the time. So there was music in the house all the time. I started just copying little things that I would hear my mom play and I would sit next to her and listen. I was very fascinated with it. When I was in school, I was thinking about other types of careers. I was pre-med for a few months. I was a psych major for two years. It wasn't until junior year of college that I finally said that music was it and I wasn't going to do anything else.
AAJ: Listening pleasures?
BC: When I was a kid, I was listening mostly to classical music because my dad had a lot of it in the house. I listened to all the stuff that was on the radio in the Sixties and Seventies. The stuff I liked was really the jazz oriented stuff. I loved Burt Bacharach. I loved Sergio Mendes. I loved anything with hip harmony in it. I've always been drawn to great harmony and secondarily to great melody, not so much rock and roll, although I liked rock and roll. I didn't hate it, but it didn't really interest me as much as the piano oriented music. Herb Alpert, I really liked his music. The 5th Dimension, their harmonic concept. I loved the black vocal groups that got into hipper harmony and interesting songs.
AAJ: What is the difference between harmony and melody?
BC: Melody is kind of the top part of the harmonic chord. In other words, what you sing when you are walking along the street, that's the melody. That's the part that you heard that is usually sung by the singer or played by the instrumentalist. The harmony is kind of the background. There's two types of background. There's rhythmic background and there's harmonic background. Rhythmic background is what the drums are playing primarily. And harmonic background in jazz music is primarily what the pianist is playing. Although, what the pianist is playing is both harmonic and melodic. That's a great question. I've never had anyone ask me that and it's a great question to present to people because we just assume that everyone knows what harmony and melody is, but melody is the top part and harmony is the part underneath.
AAJ: One of your most refreshing recordings is for a classical label, Naxos, Bill Plays Bud.
BC: And at one point, they were the largest classical label in the world, in terms of the amount of titles they had. The first thing is, Bud Powell is the most important pianist in jazz and one of the most underrated because he spent over a third of his life in mental and medical hospitals. He was beaten by the police when he was twenty and he never fully recovered from that beating and as a result, he suffered pain and had to take drugs to alleviate the pain. So he never fully recovered from that and in spite of that, he created a whole lot of wonderful music. He was really the first guy, before Bud Powell, pianists were playing boom, chuck in the left hand and a lot of melodic figures in the right hand that tended to be arpeggios. But with Bud Powell, Bud Powell was imitating Charlie Parker. So Bud was the first pianist to take Charlie Parker's language and adapt it successfully to the piano. That's why he is the most important pianist in music today because everybody plays like that now.
AAJ: And Live at Rocco featuring Joe La Barbera, characteristic of many of your sophisticated ensembles.
BC: Yeah, there are many things I love about Joe, but philosophically, he is a traditionalist. He's very, very open to anything that is innovative and stretches the tradition. So in that way, when he worked with Bill Evans, he was able to swing very, very hard in a conventional bebop setting, yet he was able to work with Bill and Bill's ideas were very creative and avant-garde within the tradition. Joe was able to adapt to that and I feel that Joe was able to give me a traditional rhythmic approach, which I sometimes really love and then other times, he is able to be very avant-garde rhythmically, not play rhythms, maybe play colors, lose the time, get it back, and be very innovative. In the sextet, that is really important because there are times in the band that we will actually play free for a little while. We won't have any tempo or any format. We're playing songs, but sometimes we stop playing the songs all together and just play whatever we want. Joe has the maturity to do both of those things and know to splice them together. There are many great musicians that when they play free, they don't know how to get out of it and back to the music. Joe is very orchestrational. He knows how long things should be. A drummer needs to be an orchestrator. If he sees that I'm going somewhere, he needs, not only to go with me, but he needs to make it feel like the music is designed that way. That is what Joe does so well. I do projects producing singers and I always use Joe because he will give me absolutely, the basic, perfect sound that I want for anything that I want to do.
AAJ: Your latest recording, How My Heart Sings is comprised of the compositions of Earl Zindars.
BC: The idea came from the head of Torii Records. I knew a few things. I knew "How My Heart Sings," "Mother of Earl," and "Elsa." I had played "Elsa" a lot. I love that tune. Earl sent me fifty or sixty tunes. There was an awful lot there that was interesting to work with. He was an interesting composer in that he was one of the first, along with Brubeck, to write songs where the time signature changes. For example, on "How My Heart Sings," the first part of the song is in a waltz feel, but the middle part of the tune is in a 4/4, medium, swing jazz feel. That was very, very innovative for the Fifties. Very few guys were doing that. His music is very interesting harmonically as well and he has a really strong melodic sense. He's a very good composer.
AAJ: Producing vocalists, are singers benefiting from the respect that comes with sales?
BC: I think the pendulum swings. I think that good singers were underrated for a while and then I think we're in it right now, where vocalists are getting a whole lot of attention. In fact, there was an article in a magazine saying if vocalists saved jazz and all my friends were saying that vocalists killed jazz. I think that vocals are getting attention because modern people like to look at things. They like to look at something rather than just listen. I think that is kind of a shame. When I was a kid, we would sit on the sofa and put records on the phonograph and sit and listen to them. We don't do it now because we're all really busy and I think it is a visual era. Singers are as much a visual experience as they are an auditory experience. I think that is why vocals are popular now. The standard tune as really established itself once again. I just heard Rod Stewart singing a standard in a Starbucks the other day. They are all doing standards albums, which I think is a great thing. I'm really happy about that.
AAJ: What is the state of jazz in Los Angeles?
BC: It's not very good, except for everywhere else. Given all that we have, it's not bad. There's radio support for it. There are clubs. There's not that many clubs, but there are a few really good places to play here. I've spent a lot of time in New York and it is getting rough back there. The super high real estate has eliminated a lot of clubs. San Francisco has this really intense interest in jazz, but there is nowhere to play there. L.A., because it is spread out and real estate isn't quite as expensive, there are all these little joints. Everyone I know is working and I think that is really great. In that way, L.A. is fairly strong. What L.A. isn't strong at is guys getting together. It is geographically far apart and there is not as much interaction and synergy as I would like. It is a mixed report. We have good jazz radio here. We have a great talent pool here. We have a few good places to play. We don't have the collaborative nature we should.
AAJ: And the future?
BC: In February, I am recording an album of salsa/Latin based music. I am using Ramon Banda and Papo Rodriguez, and some of regular guys in my band, Bobby Shew, Bob Sheppard. I am working on that. I am working right now on a commission for the Eastman School of Music. I am writing a jazz version of the Prokofiev Concerto for Piano no. 3 for big band and piano. I've loved this piece since I was a kid. It really works well in jazz. It is really a jazzy piece anyway. I just finished a DVD of beginning jazz and blues piano. I will be playing at the Jazz Bakery with a singer names Melissa Sweeney. I produced her first album. She is a really good singer.
February 29, 2004 - LA Jazz Scene
LAJS : What is a typical week like for you? Are you highly scheduled or do you have enough free time for yourself?
Bill : I teach at Cal State Fullerton from Tues through Thurs, so those days are packed. I have to be there by 10, and living in Studio City, that can be a challenge just getting there. My iPhone has a great GPS program on it, though, so I can usually figure out the best way to get there in under an hour. I get out of school around 7, and might just do homework, grade papers, etc, until 8. Then I'm home in about 50 minutes. Often I stay down there one night a week... there are many good cheap hotels down there.
I teach improvisation, direct four combos, a big band, have five piano students and teach arranging or jazz history. It's a lot crammed into three days, but I really enjoy my students.
LAJS : You lived in New York for some time: You sent us columns from N.Y. so we got an idea about the jazz scene there. Why did you return to L.A.? What didn’t you like about New York?
Bill : Dave, I've been torn between NY and LA for quite some time. I still have a place in NY, which is rented out a lot, and I love the people there, the scene, the energy. But it's expensive, and living there takes up a lot of energy.
LAJS : It seems that you have found enough work to satisfy you here in L.A. What makes L.A. good for musicians--the weather, connections, networking, more recording opportunities, etc. What do you think it is for you?
Bill: For me, work has been good in LA, and I have a great church here (All Saints, in Pasadena, where I'm composer in residence) and a great girlfriend, Wanda Lau, who is a copy editor for the LA Times. And the weather doesn't hurt, either! I never got into the studio scene here, just fell in with great players, such as John Clayton, Clay Jenkins, Bob Sheppard, and Joe LaBarbera, and just couldn't leave. Trombonist Bruce Paulson, who now lives in New Zealand, had a great weekly jam session at his house... that's where I met a lot of my friends. I do feel that because I travel a lot, LA is cool. If I were dependent on the LA jazz scene for my happiness, it wouldn't be enough. It's a very good scene, don't get me wrong, and very underrated, but one night in NY or even Chicago tells you there's a lot more out there.
These days, I'm as much a composer as a player, and LA is good for that. Excellent engineers, and recording studios, and plenty of great players on every instrument. As the industry recording thing declines, it's actually better for composers now, because you can get your stuff played and recorded, and these amazing players are available and interested in new things.
LAJS : You were nominated for a Grammy and won. Tell me about the recording and how it came about. What made it special for you?
Bill: George Klabin, a fine studio engineer (and owner of a health food supply company) recently started a record label, Resonance Records. We had done a record, Blues and the Abstract Truth, Take 2, (the music of Oliver Nelson) and we were very pleased with it. He knew I was an arranger, and he wanted me to help him do a tribute album to the music of Oscar Peterson. He knew of a Romanian pianist, Marian Petrescu, now living in Finland, who he said was the perfect guy. Boy he was right on that one. Marian is amazing... really can do Oscar, technically. And a beautiful cat, easy to work with, and a lovely spirit. Growing up, Oscar was my favorite player, and even though I had to get away from him, somewhat, to find myself, I thought it would be a lot of fun. We picked out some of the repertoire together, and I really wanted to do some things from the Oscar "West Side Story," album. George was like, I don't know, it's a lot of stuff, too much music, and I reminded him of the classic Buddy Rich arrangement of West Side that I played every night for a year and a half. I thought we could do a 13-14 minute medley of the stuff, and it would be a real big hit, especially on live gigs. He agreed, and we did it, and it came out great. In fact, he said, "this is a Grammy winner," and I poo-pooed him. But he was right!
LAJS : Tell me what the whole Grammy timeline is: How are you nominated, by mail or a phone call? Then what happens? What’s the time element here, weeks, months? How did you feel when you were nominated? Who was the first person you called with the news?
Bill: Grammy submissions are due in the fall. If you're a member, you can nominate yourself, or someone else who is a member can nominate you. To be a member, you have to have recorded or participated in an album that's available nationwide, which means it's primarily musicians, engineers and producers who vote. There are three levels, a call for ballot submissions, a call for final nominations in each category, and a final vote for the winner, which is announced in the end of January. The members vote, as far as I can tell, for the final nominations, and the winner. There are committees of respected experts, in each chapter, there are 12 or 13 of them. They are also a factor in the voting, which is great, because the Grammy, to win, your peers have to vote for you. From what I can tell, and I'm not an expert, it's a combination of the chapters, and the popular vote.
I'm savvy enough to know that as a jazz player I'm competing with the universe, but the arranging category is a bit smaller, so the odds of recognition are a little better.
This was my third nomination. I really didn't expect to win, there were some great entrants in my area, Jeremy Lubbock, Michael, Giaccino, and Vince Mendoza, one of my personal heroes. But it was a real thrill.
LAJS :Tell me what its like to actually stand on the stage and accept the Grammy. What were you feeling?
Bill: If you go on www.grammys.com, and scroll to minute 27 of the awards (it was taken down a few weeks later) you can see me, breathlessly running up to the front (I was sitting in the back with my girlfriend, Wanda, and friends Tierney Sutton and Alan Kaplan, her husband. I wasn't expecting to win, obviously, so I was way in the back, just talking. For whatever reason, I had sketched out my "bullet points" in the bizarre case of having to make a speech; you gotta thank George Klabin, the owner of the label, the cats in the band, your girlfriend, Oscar Peterson (since I borrowed much from him in the arrangement), and, of course, Leonard Bernstein.
When I got up there, I saw that in the band were a lot of friends, Ron King, Brandon Fields, etc, and I said, to no one in particular, "yeah, getting an award is nice, but you guys have a GIG! Get me on it!!"
I've heard from so many friends about the award, and it's been a wonderful experience, but I returned to earth very quickly. The next day, I was sitting in my living room with dozens of Cal State Fullerton student schedules sprawled around me, trying to figure out who's playing in the jazz small groups there. Sigh.
Winning the Grammy has made me a little less obsessive/compulsive about my career. I always feel like, I don't do enough, I need to study, create more, hustle more work, etc, etc. All you musicians know how that is. But I can relax a little bit more. I certainly don't have to worry about winning the Grammy ever again, or being concerned about how people think about me. And more importantly, I can really reflect that I've taken, maybe not the perfect life path, but a very good one, and I've done pretty much the best I can to make the most of myself.
LAJS : What are your future plans? What are looking forward to, more collaborations, composing, or something entirely new?
Bill: What I'm really excited about now is the NY premiere of a concerto I've written for trumpeter Terell Stafford and the Temple University Symphony Orchestra. It's called "fourth stream... La Banda," and it's a fusion of jazz, classical, and latin music. They are doing it at Lincoln Center in two weeks, and recording it next week. I have always loved the orchestra, and it was a thrill to write exactly what I wanted to write, and get it played.
LAJS : If you weren’t a musician what would you choose to do to make a living? I’m just being curious here, maybe you have other talents or skills that mean a lot to you.
Bill: I' m lucky to live in Studio City, just two blocks from a very fine Italian restaurant, Vitello's. Many of you remember it from the Robert Blake days. I used to take people on my Studio City/Hollywood tour. I take them to Robert Blake's old house, it used to have written on it, "Mata Hari Ranch." eeecchh! Then I take them to Vitellos, and show them the dumpster. Well, not THAT dumpster, but any old one. You just make up things, like the double decker bus drivers in NYC do. (According to them, Madonna lives in about 8 different apartments in New York.) Then I take them to the Brady Bunch house, on Dilling, the one they showed at the beginning of the program.
April Williams has been managing the music there for over a year now, and she's a great lady, supports the cats, does everything right. The room is acoustically excellent, and the young sound guys are cool, into the music, and do their job. She's had a few big bands in there, and it sounds fantastic. So I decided to do, perhaps, the dumbest thing, the most foolhardy thing a musician can do.
Start a big band.
Well, for one night, anyway. My old friend Bruce Paulson did this for a gig in Alaska, announcing, "this is the first AND last gig of the Bruce Paulson Big Band." And it was, too. This night, April 17, will be a little less stressful. Just an hour and a half, and we'll finish with the Grammy-winning West Side Story arrangement. I'm getting as many of the cats from the session that I can. We'll start with champagne at 7:30, and the band kicks off at 8:30 until 11. Should be fun. If you have a lot of champagne, we'll sound even better.
Future plans? I'm a little bit in transition. I've been writing so much, the piano looks lonesome over there. Gotta go give it some love!! Holly Hofmann and I have a duo, and we have a new record out, and we're going to do more with that. And I'm going to Hawaii in June with my girlfriend, Wanda. We recently celebrated a year together, to the amazement of my friends.
