Composer, arranger, and actor Laurent Ziliani announces the release of Anyone Can Whistle: A Sondheim Journey, a deeply personal album reimagining the music of Stephen Sondheim through jazz, big band, and intimate vocal arrangements. Released March 22, the album explores the many dimensions of love through songs drawn from nine of Sondheim’s landmark musicals.
Blending lush orchestration, sophisticated jazz harmony, and emotionally direct performances, the project marks several firsts for Ziliani: his debut as a vocalist on a full-length record, his first large-scale work for big band, and his first self-produced album.
For years, Ziliani worked primarily behind the scenes composing for film, television, video games, and commercial media. Anyone Can Whistle: A Sondheim Journey represents a turning point—a project created without brief or expectation, guided instead by instinct and personal taste.
The album began unexpectedly when Ziliani arranged several Sondheim songs for a theatre project that never materialized. Revisiting those early demos later, he discovered a creative freedom he hadn’t felt in years. Approaching Sondheim’s music through jazz allowed the songs to shift subtly, opening space for vulnerability, ambiguity, and reinterpretation while remaining faithful to their emotional core.
Although Sondheim’s world initially felt distant from his own, Ziliani found surprising personal resonance in the composer’s writing. The result is an album that unfolds as a continuous listening experience, with carefully shaped transitions allowing songs to flow into one another as a single emotional arc.
Featuring performances by internationally acclaimed guest musicians including drummer Peter Erskine, bassist Michael Valerio, saxophonists Alexander Mathias, Alex Terrier and Zac Zinger, pianist Cédric Hanriot, vibraphonist Nick Mancini, and ensembles recorded in Budapest, the album balances expansive big band textures with moments of striking intimacy.
At its heart, Anyone Can Whistle: A Sondheim Journey is an album about love in all its forms—familial, romantic, remembered, and evolving—dedicated to the people who shape our lives: parents, siblings, partners, friends, former lovers, and those still yet to arrive.
“When I stopped worrying about expectations and allowed myself to make the music I genuinely wanted to hear, everything changed,” says Ziliani.
Laurent Ziliani is a Los Angeles–based composer, actor, and producer whose work spans film, television, video games, and the stage. Active in the local theatre scene and a producer with O1 Pictures, he moves between storytelling disciplines, bringing cinematic sensibility and jazz-influenced harmony to his musical work.