Bassist, producer
With a professional career as a bassist that dates back to his teenage years, Marcus Miller has played on more than 500 albums with close to 200 different performers. His work as a session musician in the 1980s included numerous television and radio advertisem*nts, contributions to hit songs such as Aretha Franklin's "Jump to It" and Luther Vandross's "Never Too Much," and writing, production, and performance credits on Miles Davis's Tutu album, to name but a few of his accomplishments. Miller made his debut as a solo artist with Suddenly in 1983 and followed it with a self-titled release the next year.
From there, it would be almost a decade before he released his third solo album, The Sun Don't Lie, in 1993. Miller released two more solo albums in the 1990s before wowing critics with M2: Power and Grace in 2001. The album, a mixture of jazz, R&B, and modern rock, was his most successful to date and earned the musician a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album in 2002. With two more albums to his credit in the new century, Miller carved out a substantial presence as a solo artist who could cross the border between jazz and popular music.
Born on June 14, 1959, in Brooklyn, New York, Miller grew up in the Jamaica section of neighboring Queens. His earliest musical influence came from his father, who played piano and organ in church. After seeing the Jackson 5, the budding musician was inspired to put together singing groups with other children in his neighborhood. Miller, who started studying the recorder at age eight and the clarinet at age ten, learned composition and music theory in the classroom but picked up some valuable lessons at home as well. "When I was thirteen, fourteen, I would buy the sheet music to all the popular songs and want to play them," he recounted on his official Web site. "My pops would show me shortcuts to playing the songs. He taught me how to just read guitar chord symbols and make up my own accompaniment instead of laboring to decipher the written accompaniment. … I didn't learn to read piano music that well, but I learned a lot about chord changes, voicings, and harmony."
Collaborated with Miles Davis
Miller entered the prestigious LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts, where he studied the clarinet while learning to play the bass guitar on his own. He started spending more time on the bass after he formed different funk and dance bands with friends at school and in his neighborhood. After he completed high school at age 16, Miller intended to continue studying the clarinet at the Mannes School of Music. In the end, however, he decided to take a more practical route and study the instrument at local Queens College while playing gigs as a bassist with local groups such as Harlem River Drive. "A couple of years into college, I was working heavy," Miller wrote on his Web site. "I was doing records, commercials, and I was in the house band at Saturday Night Live (where I met [David] Sanborn). I stuck it out in college for two more years." Finally, Miller realized, "I was burning out, so I left school and the clarinet behind to play bass full time."
By the time he left Queens College, Miller had already made his recording debut as a bassist on drummer Lenny White's 1976 release Big City. For the next several years, the young bassist was one of the most in-demand session players for jazz combos, R&B singers, and commercial jingles. He worked with Roberta Flack, David Sanborn, and Bobbi Humphrey, and in 1980 became a regular player in legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis's lineup. Eventually, Miller became a significant collaborator in what turned out to be the final phase in Davis's long career, producing and writing some of the compositions on Davis's 1986 album Tutu. A transitional work that incorporated traditional and electronic jazz elements, the album was hailed by many as one of the most important jazz works of the 1980s.
Miller also made his mark on the contemporary R&B scene by playing on hits such as Aretha Franklin's "Jump to It" and "Get It Right" and Luther Vandross's "Never Too Much." Another song he co-wrote for Vandross, "Power of Love/Love Power," became a major R&B and crossover pop hit and won Miller the 1991 Grammy Award for Best R&B Song. He told Paul Tingen of Sound on Sound, "I always play what is appropriate for the situation. I am supporting whoever the artist is, and whatever the artist wants. When I pro- duced Luther Vandross in 1991 there were times when he told me, ‘I want a commercial record. Marcus, write me a hit song.’ So I took half an hour and put together ‘Power of Love,’ and it went to number three in the charts."
Many jazz traditionalists were riled by Miller's pioneering use of electronic instruments in jazz recordings during the 1980s. The use of drum machines and synthesizers came to prominence during the decade, especially in the "smooth jazz" genre identified with Miller's collaborator, David Sanborn. While aware of the shortcomings of electronic instruments, Miller explained to Sound on Sound that technological advances were fundamentally transforming how recordings were made: "A lot of people blame the technology, but it's not the technology's fault. There are many ways to make bad music. If someone plays guitar badly, nobody blames the guitar, so why blame technology?"
Won Grammy Award in 2002
In 1983 Miller released his own first album, Suddenly, and Marcus Miller followed in 1984. The musician admitted to being somewhat disappointed in the two albums, which attempted to follow along the smooth R&B and jazz lines of his session work. "I kind of shortchanged myself," he told Jazzwise, as posted on his Web site. "I really didn't have a strong musical identity and maybe needed to wait a little longer. I was heavily influenced by Luther and that R&B thing so my album reflected that. I needed to hold off a little because I wasn't really sure who I was. When I started again I had a much clearer sense of who I was and started to include a lot more jazz elements from my past."
Miller waited almost a decade before releasing another album of his own, 1993's The Sun Don't Lie, which earned him a Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Jazz Album. Miller returned to live performing in support of the album, which helped to restore his reputation as a leading jazz musician. Tales arrived in 1995 and continued Miller's trend toward expanding the genre to reflect other African-American musical forms. "I tried to combine the old style of soulfulness with the new hip-hop rhythm," he explained on the PRA Records Web site. "There's no real rapping, but there's that flavor. And in the middle, I try to use the seventies as my connecting sound, the sound of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions or Talking Book, or Earth, Wind & Fire. I've always combined old and new Black music. That's what I have been about, and this is kind of a new way of looking at it."
In 2001 Miller released M2: Power and Grace, which contained original compositions alongside jazz standards by John Coltrane and Charles Mingus and the modern rock classic by the Talking Heads, "Burning Down the House." Miller told Billboard, "Music today often has either power or grace, but rarely both. Martin Luther King could be strong, but he never lost a sense of beauty when he spoke. When Miles played his horn or Michael Jordan plays basketball, it is a combination of heart, soul, and mind. I try to capture that in music." Welcomed by critics as Miller's most exciting project yet, M2 earned the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album in 2002.
Work Combined Jazz and Pop Genres
Miller's career as a solo artist became better and better established during the 2000s. He was able to draw on the talents of major stars such as Eric Clapton, who appeared on Miller's 2005 album Silver Rain and cowrote the title track, based on a poem by Langston Hughes, with the bassist. Miller began to snare gigs at major jazz events such as the Playboy and JVC Newport jazz festivals. He commanded a substantial following in Europe, and in 2007 released the album Free while there.
For the Record …
Born on June 14, 1959, in Brooklyn, NY; married; wife's name Brenda; three children. Education: Attended Queens College, Queens, NY.
Worked as studio musician, 1970s; performed with Miles Davis's band, early 1980s; released first solo album, Suddenly, 1983; released The Sun Don't Lie, 1993; released M2: Power and Grace, 2001; released Silver Rain, 2005; performed at JVC Jazz Festival, Newport, RI, 2007; released Marcus, 2008.
Awards: Grammy Awards, Best R&B Song, for "Power of Love/Love Power," 1991; Best Contemporary Jazz Album, for M2: Power and Grace, 2002.
Addresses: Record company—PRA Records, 29171 Grayfox St., Malibu, CA 90265, Web site: http://www.prarecords.com. Office—c/o Takamasa Honda, P.O. Box 5152, Santa Monica, CA 90409. Web site—Marcus Miller Official Web site: http://www.marcusmiller.com.
Married and with three small children, Miller began to work extensively out of his home studio. In 2008 he released the album Marcus on the Concord Jazz label. Once again Miller recruited top-notch vocal collabora- tors: Lalah Hathaway, bluesman Keb' Mo', and, on a cover of the 1976 Deniece Williams hit "Free," jazz vocalist Corinne Bailey Rae. The album also included spoken-word tracks featuring Shihan the Poet and actress Taraji P. Henson. Interviewer Rashid D. Ollison of the Baltimore Sun declared that "Marcus Miller is in a happy space these days, and the jazz-pop bassist didn't even have to tell me so. Just listen to his new album, simply titled Marcus. Practically every note glows." Miller's happy space lay comfortably in between jazz and African-American popular music, a gap that few other performers have been able to bridge so successfully.
Selected discography
Suddenly, Warner Bros., 1983.
Marcus Miller, Warner Bros., 1984.
The Sun Don't Lie, PRA, 1993.
Tales, PRA, 1995.
Live and More, GRP, 1997.
M2: Power and Grace, Dreyfus, 2001.
Silver Rain, Koch, 2005.
Marcus, Concord Jazz, 2008.
Sources
Periodicals
Baltimore Sun, April 3, 2008.
Billboard, May 12, 2001, p. 111.
People, March 24, 2008, p. 47.
Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, MA), August 5, 2007, p. G1.
Sound on Sound, July 1999.
Online
"Marcus Miller," All Music Guide,http://www.allmusic.com (June 29, 2008).
"Marcus Miller's Biography," PRA Records, http://prarecords.com/artists/miller/bio.html (April 17, 2002).
"Marcus Miller: M2," National Public Radio, http://www.nprjazz.org/reviews/miller.cd.html (April 17, 2002).
Marcus Miller Official Web site, http://www.marcusmiller.com (April 17, 2002).
—Timothy Borden and James M. Manheim
