Bill Elliott (musician)

Bill Elliott (born William F. Elliott, October 2, 1951) is a keyboardist, songwriter, composer, and Tony Award winning Broadway ochestrator.

Early years

Elliott grew up in Wayland, Massachusetts, about 20 miles west of Boston. In 1969, he graduated from Wayland High School, where he played clarinet in the school band. He wrote his first orchestrations for the the band to play at halftime for their football games. He did not attend college and stated, "I just wanted to be a musician". He began playing keyboards in local bands and was basically self-taught. He liked swing music even as a teenager, and learned to play Fats Waller-style stride piano, but this stayed on the back burner.

He progressed to performing for major acts, such as Livingston Taylor, Johnathan Taylor, and Tom Rush in the mid 1970s.

Development

In 1969, at age 18, he moved to Los Angeles and one of his first studio gigs was performing on a record an album by John Compton. He returned to Boston to go on tour with major acts, such as Livingston Taylor, Johnathan Taylor, and Tom Rush in the mid 1970s.. In 1977, at age 26, he returned to L.A. and began touring with Bonnie Raitt. Between tours, he was on the studio scene. He got a lot of work doing demos for music publishers and in this process, got to be on the inner circle of recording keyboardists, putting touring on hold.

Finding his niche

In his 30s, punk music and new wave music came in, and he thought he just didn't fit with it. He focused more on writing and arranging. He started by working for little or no pay, scoring low-budget films. In 1989, he wrote a song for the Warren Beatty film Dick Tracy. The film called for a 1930s big band number, and this was something he always liked anyway, but for years had kept it as a hobby, separate from his contemporary pop career. Now he fallen into a niche market — writing new music that sounded like old music. He said, "here was something I excelled at, and few others were doing it."

He wrote music for the TV show Northern Exposure and programs for Disney and HBO. By the 1990s his career was almost exclusively arranging, composing, and orchestrating for film, TV and children's music.

At about the year 2000, his niche work began to dry up, and he was eager to return to his home in the Boston area. A job opening came along in Boston's Berklee School of Music in the Contemporary Writing and Production Department. He was not an academic, but he had real world experience that suited the job perfectly.

In Boston, he also landed work with the Boston Pops and has written over 50 pieces for them. He received an Emmy nomination in 2012 for a PBS documentary with Michael Feinstein called The Sinatra Legacy

Elliott had some early success in a country-rock band called The Rowan Brothers, who eventually opened for The Grateful Dead. Elliiott performed on their 1962 album The Rowan Brothers which featured Jerry Garcia as guest artist and also steel guitar vurtuoso Buddy Emmons.

He moved to Los Angeles and became a member of Bonnie Raitt's band. He worked as a studio musician for a while, then started his own band, "The Bill Elliott Swing Orchestra". He said, "I learned arranging on the fly, just trying it out."

Broadway

While at Berklee School, he began writing for Broadway shows such as Anything Goes and in 2012 was nominated for both Tony and Grammy awards for Nice Work If You Can Get It. Elliott along with two other collaborators, won a Tony Award got his orchestration of the Broadway musical, An American in Paris. When Elliott came onto the project, the production had already been performed in Paris for four months. They wanted someone to come into the project who could change the music for its Broadway debut, so they hired Elliott. He said, "I felt like I was hire to put the 'American' in An American in Paris." In this process, the show is fine-tuned based on what the director feel the audience responds to; for example a change in a dance routine requires that the music for that dance be re-written.