[6] Elliott began as a Los Angeles studio musician, recording with artists such as Stevie Nicks, Smokey Robinson, Donna Summer, Bette Midler, and others.
Films that feature Elliott's music include Dick Tracy, Nixon, Contact, Independence Day and Wedding Crashers.
[10] He has written music for Disney's video sequels to Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and for the television shows Northern Exposure, Ellen and Gilmore Girls.
[2][9] At age 42, he formed "The Bill Elliott Swing Orchestra", which has performed on movie soundtracks and on record albums for prominent artists.
Encouraged by director George Doren, Elliott wrote his first orchestrations for the band to play at football game halftimes.
[9] In 1969, at age 18, he was invited to come to Los Angeles to perform on a recording by one of his Massachusetts friends, John Compton, who was making his first studio album called In California.
He performed on their 1972 album The Rowan Brothers, featuring Jerry Garcia and produced by bluegrass mandolinist David Grisman.
[13] Elliott was booked on sessions to record with artists including Stevie Nicks, Donna Summer, America, Robbie Dupree, and Smokey Robinson.
[2] Later, he obtained jobs arranging music for Disney Studios, including video sequels to Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.
He wrote for TV's Northern Exposure, Ellen, the Drew Carey Show and ABC's The Shirley Temple Story.
[11] Taking advantage of a swing dance revival in the 1990s, the band attracted dancers of the Jitterbug and the Lindy Hop initially, but the orchestra gained stature and acceptance to the point of being featured on film soundtracks and albums of major artists.
[11] Examples include Midnight, a jazz album by Diane Schuur that was written and produced by Barry Manilow;[19] and the HBO film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, starring Halle Berry, which featured Elliott's orchestra on the soundtrack.
[23] By the late 1990s Elliott's career was almost exclusively focused on arranging, composing, and orchestrating for film, television, and children's music, with some time allotted for his orchestra.
He was hardly an academic, yet Elliott had the real-world experience that suited the job perfectly, and he accepted the offer and began teaching at Berklee in 2004.
[9] In 2008, he was the music director for a PBS documentary with Michael Feinstein called The Sinatra Legacy which later received an Emmy nomination.
[30][31] Elliott, along with co-writer Greg Anthony Rassen, won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Orchestrations in 2017 for the Broadway musical Bandstand.
[6] In 2015 Elliott, along with two collaborators, Don Sebesky and Christofer Austin, won a Tony Award for his orchestration in the Broadway musical An American in Paris.