While jazz pianist, composer and Grammy Award-winning arranger Bill Cunliffe continued to teach and arrange music with normal efficiency during the COVID pandemic, he says he was tapped out creatively. But Cunliffe says nothing rejuvenates a composer more than an imposing deadline, he was given one by Terell Stafford, Music Director of Jazz Studies of Temple University’s Boyer College of Music, and Robert Stroker, Boyer’s Dean and Vice Provost of the Arts.
The result was Cunliffe’s three-movement composition Rainforests, which celebrates the tropical mangroves and will be available on digitally September 8 via BCM+D Records. The piece was performed by the Temple University Studio Orchestra with Stafford, Dick Oatts, Tim Warfield, Bruce Barth, Mike Boone and Justin Faulkner, and conducted by José Luis Domínguez.
Rainforest is the first of three commissioned works to be released digitally by BCM+D. The others are Grammy-award winning pianist Billy Childs’ work Labyrinth and Temple’s ensemble player Banks Sapnar’s Red Braid. Cunliffe, Childs and Sapnar’s compositions were performed at Lincoln Center on April 14 and recorded the following day. Labyrinth and Red Braid will be released Winter 2024 and the three works will be released together, including Rainforest, on CD in April.
“For years, I’ve been intrigued by trees,” Cunliffe says. “Not only the trees in my neighborhood of Studio City, California, but the trees that keep us safe and healthy such as the tropical mangrove. Its tangle of roots allows the trees to handle the daily rise and fall of tides and slow the movement of tidal waters, causing sediments to build up the muddy bottom.”
Mangrove forests stabilize the coastline, reducing erosion from storm surges, currents, waves and tides, and the intricate root system makes these forests attractive to fish and other organisms seeking food and shelter from predators.
“The mangroves in the rainforests are truly the heart of our planet and help keep us alive,” Cunliffe says. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot, and the music of the tropics has always been a focus of mine, with the recordings I’ve done of Brazilian and Cuban music, samba and salsa.”
Instead of ruminating for periods of time over the musical material, the imposed deadline forced Cunliffe to accept the material immediately offered to him, like the strange child-like melodies that often appear to him after waking up from dreams.
“Rather than cast them aside,” Cunliffe says, “this time I wrote them down and, accepting the theory of Bill Dobbins, my former teacher at Eastman, that there is ‘no such thing as a bad idea,’ and started to work on carving these stones into sculptures of music I could be proud of.”
Cunliffe says having three great horn soloists (trumpeter Stafford, and saxophonists Oatts and Warfield), a great piano soloist (Barth) and a fabulous symphony orchestra directed by Domínguez, “one of our great conductors, meant I couldn’t go wrong.”
“The first movement of Rainforests starts with a large battery of percussion playing rainforest-like sounds in the style of a samba, the national dance of Brazil seen all year long,” Cunliffe says, “but especially during Mardi Gras, in the streets and barrios. The simple four-note melody is presented and twisted and turned by Tim Warfield in a variety of ways."
Cunliffe says movement two is a cross between a Mexican bolero and a Brazilian bossa, cast as a slow romantic movement. “The great Dick Oatts presents the theme as a series of descending thirds, then improvises for a while.” he adds. “The movement ends with a cadenza featuring rainforest sounds as before, with the soloists adding bird calls and other exotic sounds.”
The energetic street dance is the final movement, with added movements into meters of 5, 6 and 7, is stated by Stafford and echoed by the orchestra. “Hints of jazz big band figures lead into complex rhythmic figures you could get lost in like the rainforest!” Cunliffe says.
“A transitional passage built on a Brazilian drum rhythm leads into the final climax, a batucada-like street dance as I saw in Rio so many years ago but overlaid with jazz soloists and dissonant harmonies,” Cunliffe says.
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