Real name: Robert L. Zieff

American jazz composer and educator best know for his compositions and arrangements recorded by Chet Baker. He was born in 1927 in Lynn, Massachusetts, and studied music at Boston University. Zieff worked in the Boston jazz scene in the first half of the 1950s, and became a teacher to Dick Twardzik. He moved to New York in 1955 and became associated with a group of progressive jazz arrangers that also included Gil Evans, John Lewis, and George Russell. Saxophonist Tony Ortega also featured Zieff's work on Anthony Ortega - Jazz For Young Moderns (And Old Buzzards, Too). Zieff, who called himself an "underground jazz composer", left New York and his career as a full-time musician and arranger in 1959 to work in music education, first in Los Angeles, and later in several other locations including Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Jazz researcher Jack Chambers interviewed Zieff and documented his life and career in an issue of the journal "Sirena" (published by The Johns Hopkins University Press for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College)