Grammy Award-winning jazz pianist and composer Bill Cunliffe will lead the season’s first Jazz Vespers service at 5:00 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 19, on the Chancel at All Saints Church, 132 North Euclid Avenue. He will be joined by drummer Joe LaBarbera and bassist Darek Oles. The event is free and open to the public, with validated parking available at Plaza las Fuentes. No reservations are required.
Cunliffe, the church’s composer-in-residence, is known for his swinging, genre-blending compositions and arrangements. He began his career with the Buddy Rich Big Band and has performed with legends including Frank Sinatra, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Benny Golson and James Moody.
Now an acclaimed solo artist and bandleader, Cunliffe has released more than a dozen albums. His latest trio recording, “River Edge, New Jersey,” features bassist Martin Wind and drummer Tim Horner and was released in April by Azica Records. He also leads a big band, a Latin jazz group called Imaginación, and a classical-jazz ensemble known as Trimotif.
Cunliffe’s work spans jazz, Latin and classical traditions. His “Overture, Waltz and Rondo” for jazz piano, trumpet and orchestra earned him a Grammy nomination in 2012. That same year, he released a tuba concerto with Jim Self and the Hollywood Ensemble, and a solo Christmas album “That Time of Year” (Metre Records, 2011), praised by the Los Angeles Times as a “tour de force.”
His recordings also pay tribute to musical icons Bud Powell, Oliver Nelson and Paul Simon, and reflect his affinity for Latin rhythms, including the Grammy-nominated trumpet concerto “fourth stream … La Banda.”
Cunliffe scored Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s documentary “On the Shoulders of Giants,” which won an NAACP Image Award. He recently completed a film noir score for Singaporean director Ying J. Tan and is producing a jazz album for singer Freda Payne.
His instructional books, including “Jazz Keyboard Toolbox” and “Jazz Inventions for Keyboard,” are widely used in jazz education. His more recent publications include “Uniquely Christmas” (2012), inspired by his holiday CD, and “Uniquely Familiar: Standards for Advanced Solo Piano” (2010).
A professor of jazz studies at Cal State Fullerton, Cunliffe has received five Grammy nominations, two Emmy nods and the Los Angeles Jazz Society’s Composer/Arranger Award. He won the Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition in 1989 and studied under jazz icon Mary Lou Williams at Duke University before earning his master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music.
For more on Cunliffe’s work, visit www.billcunliffe.com.
