Bill Laurance

Pianist, keyboardist and composer Bill Laurance’s music evokes a striking sense of time and place. As an original member of 5-time Grammy Award-winning group Snarky Puppy, Laurance has toured the world countless times, playing hundreds of concerts to tens of thousands of fans worldwide.

His brand new solo release HOPE comprises 3 parts exploring the aspiration of hope: trust, persistence and change. A track commissioned by the Internationally acclaimed dancer/choreographer and Artistic director Hope Boykin for the Hope Boykin Dance Company, it premiered as part of the Philadelphia Ballet's work Endure in February 2023.

“In a world of such uncertainty HOPE is an exploration into how and why we should remain hopeful.” (Bill Laurance)

The record follows a frenetic run of solo albums that include Affinity (2022), Live at the EFG London Jazz Festival (2021) and Cables (2019), as well as his most recent collaboration with Snarky Puppy bassist Michael League entitled Where You Wish You Were (2023). HOPE is a a natural continuation of Laurance’s lifelong infatuation with the piano. This began with a childhood love of ragtime, demonstrating an early determination by earning his keep over three summers at a Soho restaurant residency.

Attending the University of Leeds, he majored in classical composition, exploring jazz, funk and drum’n’bass in addition to classical music. Since then he has honed the melodic immediacy of this approach, along with his intense improvisational prowess, forging a distinctive personal style that embraces English classical, electronica and jazz-rock sensibilities, alongside gritty contemporary grooves.

In the early-noughties, a twenty-something Laurance was trying to make a living on the Leeds music scene, when an unremarkable but timely pick-up gig presented itself with a young Michael League in singer Michael Solomon Williams’ band. Gigs in the north of England forged a friendship with League, who happened to be looking for a new piano player, and League invited Laurance to the US to record the first Snarky Puppy album, The Only Constant, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Since then, Laurance has clocked up recordings and or performances with such renowned artists as David Crosby, Morcheeba, Salif Keita, Terence Blanchard, Susana Baca, Lalah Hathaway, Laura Mvula, Jacob Collier, Musiq Soul Child, Khalid Sansi, Chris Potter, Lionel Loueke, Carlos Malta, The Metropole Orchestra and the WDR Big Band. He has also worked extensively in the dance world with companies including Alvin Ailey, Ballet Rambert, Matthew Bourne's Adventures in Motion Pictures, Phoenix Dance, Northern Ballet Theatre and the English National Ballet. He has also composed music for a variety of different clients including Apple, Sky, Nokia and Hewlett Packard.

He is a champion of cutting-edge keyboard developments and is endorsed by: Moog, Mellotron, Sequential, Korg, Nord, Roli Seaboard, Yamaha, Roland, Arp Odyssey, Keyscape, Sound Brenner, Native Instruments and MXR. Alongside Laurance’s touring as a solo artist and with Snarky Puppy, Laurance is the Artist in residence at Morley College London. He is is a passionate educator and continues to give clinics at music institutions all over the world.