Marcus Miller wonders when he became the elder statesman
Calling multi-instrumentalist Marcus Miller precocious doesn’t quite capture the scope and depth of his musical talent. Coming of age on the New York scene in the mid-1970s, he started gigging before he graduated high school, working with populist jazz artists like pianist/keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith and flutist Bobbi Humphrey. But it was a call from Miles Davis that catapulted him into the jazz firmament.
Plagued by health problems and substance abuse, the trumpet legend was just emerging from five years off the scene when he called the 22-year-old electric bass phenomenon. As usual, the trumpeter’s eye for spotting remarkable talent proved prescient, as Miller went on to work with many of jazz and R&B’s most consequential artists, including Luther Vandross, Chaka Khan and David Sanborn. As a composer, he’s written scores for numerous films, such as House Party, Boomerang, and Above the Rim, and Chris Rock’s UPN sitcom Everybody Hates Chris.
After all those years as a wunderkind, he finds himself positioned now to be a mentor and elder statesman. The band he brings to Kuumbwa on Monday, Aug. 24 is stocked with players who are about the same age he was when he went on the road with Davis, a somewhat shocking situation for someone who was “always the youngest guy in the band,” says Miller, 56.
“All of a sudden I’m the dude with all the stories,” he says. “Hopefully I’m enlightening them a little bit.”
Miller is celebrating the release of his debut album on the storied Blue Note label, Afrodeezia, which is built upon his working band with alto saxophonist Alex Han, trumpeter Lee Hogans, pianist Brett Williams, guitarist Adam Agati, and drummer Louis Cato. He first heard Han while doing a residency at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and was so impressed that he immediately scooped him up, though only for summers at first, as he didn’t want the sophomore to drop out of school.
“Alex is an amazing altoist, and now he just finished recording his first album,” Miller says. “He suggested the drummer, and the drummer suggested the guitar player, so I’ve been tapping into these great young musicians. Brett Williams is from Pittsburgh. He’s 23 years old, and immensely talented. I can’t call a tune he doesn’t know.”
Rounding out the band that Miller brings to Kuumbwa is French-born percussion master Mino Cinelu, a comrade from his early 1980s stint with Miles Davis. Miller wasn’t just looking for some generational solidarity in recruiting Cinelu. In order to tackle the music from Afrodeezia he needed a versatile percussionist commanding a vast array of rhythmic traditions and an expansive instrumental palette.
Inspired by his travels as a UNESCO spokesperson for the Slave Route project, Miller traces the African diaspora experience from Senegal to Brazil and the Caribbean. But he struck up the key relationship behind Afrodeezia not in West Africa or South America, but in Eastern Europe. During a jazz festival in Poland, Alune Wade introduced himself saying, “I’m known as the Senegalese Marcus Miller.”
“We started talking about how to connect with African musicians for this project, and he said instead of traveling all over the continent I should go to Paris,” Miller says. “He introduced me to all these incredible African musicians. I started to learn French a few years ago, so I was able to communicate pretty well.”
Wade ended up contributing lead vocals on the album’s infectiously grooving opening track “Hylife.” Miller collaborated with kora player Cherif Soumano, another Senegalese master, on “B’s River,” which also features Trinidadian jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles (who played Kuumbwa very recently), and Miller on bass, bass clarinet and gimbri, a plucked lute associated with the Gnawa people of Morocco. And on the gospel-steeped “Preacher’s Kid (Song for William H),” Miller captures the continuum encompassing African and African-American culture while holding forth on upright bass, clarinet and piano.
“It’s important to get people to recognize and celebrate the resilience of African people and culture,” Miller says. “I’m traveling around, hearing rhythms in North Africa that remind me of rhythms from West Africa. I hear Brazilian samba and calypso and all have this similar rhythm. Africans were stripped of everything, and were able to come through the situation maintaining their dignity and spirit, and music was the salvation.”
MILLER TIME Jazz multi-instrumentalist Marcus Miller, whose latest album ‘Afrodeezia’ traces the sound of the African diaspora, brings his band to the Kuumbwa on Monday, Aug. 24, 7 and 9 p.m. 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $30/adv, $35/door. 427-2227.
