Bill Pierce has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a music educator and performer. Pierce has been a Berklee faculty member for more than three decades and has performed with some of the indisputable masters of jazz—Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams, Max Roach, Art Farmer, Hank Jones, James Williams, Kevin Eubanks, Branford Marsalis and Wynton Marsalis, to name a few. At Berklee during the late 1960s, Pierce went for total immersion in music, studying jazz during the day and gigging at night. For two years, he played steadily at the Sugar Shack, a now defunct club on Boylston Street opposite the Boston Common where all of the top R&B acts used to play. Pierce interrupted his studies for a short time to tour with Stevie Wonder. He subsequently returned to graduate and then became a part-time member of the faculty in 1975. He focused on playing jazz locally until the night he sat in with drummer Art Blakey’s group. After hearing him, Blakey asked him to join the band. That gave Pierce stature in the jazz world and kept him on the road about 10 months a year for nearly three years. Pierce later teamed up with the late great drummer Tony Williams and made five recordings with him. Pierce’s tenor and soprano saxophone can be heard on more 90 recordings on which he was a sideman and on 11 as a leader. In addition, he is a featured saxophonist at major international jazz festivals.
