The Prisoner is the seventh Herbie Hancock album, recorded in 1969 and released in January 1970 for the Blue Note label, his final project for the label before moving to Warner Bros. Records. It is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated the previous year. It features some of Herbie’s most interesting and challenging compositions.

Bill will perform this music with a great lineup of Clay Jenkins, trumpet, Bob Sheppard and Rob Lockart, saxes and woodwinds, Lamar Guillary, trombone, Kevin Kanner, drums and Darek Oles, bass.

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Bill Cunliffe, a graduate of Duke University and the Eastman School of Music,  is a jazz pianist, composer and Grammy Award-winning arranger. The 1989 winner of the Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition, he performs around the world as a leader and sideman and as a soloist with symphony orchestra.

Cunliffe was awarded a Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement for “West Side Story Medley,” on the album “Resonance Big Band Plays Tribute to Oscar Peterson” (Resonance Records, 2009).

Cunliffe has more than a dozen albums under his name. Recent recordings include a tribute to children’s music, “Playground Swing” (Metre Records, 2015) the Bill Cunliffe Trio’s “River Edge, New Jersey” (Azica Records, 2013) and Overture, Waltz and Rondo for jazz piano, trumpet and orchestra (BCM+D Records, 2012), which won Cunliffe his fifth Grammy nomination, for Best Instrumental Composition. “That Time of Year” (Metre Records, 2011), an album of solo improvisations on Christmas carols that was described as a “tour de force” in the Los Angeles Times.

After working with Buddy Rich and Frank Sinatra, he performed and toured with the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, the Clayton Brothers Quintet, vocalists Marlena Shaw and Natalie Cole, and in duo with flutist Holly Hofmann for over ten years.