Marcus Miller interview: “It was incredible to travel with Miles, and see the effect he had on people all around the world”

In an age when the curriculum vitae no longer counts for much, Marcus Miller’s achievements mark him out as unique. He’s played on over 500 albums, including many by the crème de la crème of popular music – Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Luther Vandross, Beyoncé, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Mariah Carey, Elton John, Eric Clapton – the list is seemingly endless. In jazz, his playing credits include Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner, Grover Washington Jr, Dr John, David Sanborn, The Crusaders, Don Cherry, Dizzy Gillespie and, most famously, Miles Davis. Perhaps not so well-known is the fact that he was asked join Weather Report when Jaco Pastorius left, but had to decline as he had committed to Davis. And rather than sit at home with his feet up during what little downtime his busy life permitted, he also found time to write almost 30 motion picture scores and record, produce and tour over a dozen albums under his own name.

Yet despite all this, Miller remains an artist dedicated to the bass guitar, and his evolving mastery of the instrument has kept him at top of the game, whatever winds of change were blowing through jazz, R&B, pop and funk. His playing has remained timeless, able to fit in to any musical situation. Yet his feet have remained on terra firma throughout. Gracious, with a natural charm, he is a sharp observer of the human condition, loves a laugh and has a sharp yet subtle sense of humour. Music is in his DNA: his father, a minister in the church who played piano and organ had a piano playing first cousin called Wynton Kelly, the Wynton Kelly, who played most famously on Kind of Blue.

Although he formally studied clarinet, Marcus had a prodigious gift for music, which, allied to a fierce work ethic, saw him branching out at a young age on bass guitar onto the Queens, New York jazz scene, where drummer Omar Hakim took him under his wing. His father secured permission to take a semester off college to tour with drummer Lenny White and subsequently, word spread about a super- talented young bassist and studio work in New York began to follow, to the point where he decided to drop out of college and continue to establish himself on the highly competitive NYC scene.

Marcus Miller and Miles Davis

While working with singer Roberta Flack, Marcus made two important connections that would lift his career to a
new level.

“Luther Vandross was the man!” recalls Miller. “He and I met at Roberta Flack’s, this was in 1979, he was already a very popular background singer in New York; he would go to different recording sessions and add background vocals, he arranged them, he’d call two, three other singers, and they’d put background vocals on your record and take it to another level – and Roberta would take us out on the road and that’s when he and I became buddies.

"I played on his first demo, which included ‘Never Too Much’, which was his first breakout hit [the album of the same name went to No.19 on the Billboard chart], and he became an overnight sensation, even though he had been on the scene for at least 10 years behind the scenes! Once ‘Never Too Much’ came out, Clive Davis called and said, ‘Hey man, write something for Aretha Franklin,’ and he [Vandross] and I wrote a song called ‘Jump To It’ for Aretha, which became a big hit [her first since 1976], and we fell into songwriting, our relationship was cool.” Subsequently, Marcus co-produced and arranged 12 Vandross albums between 1981 and 2003 as well as co-writing several Vandross hits: ‘I Really Didn't Mean It’, ‘Any Love’, ‘Power of Love/Love Power’ and ‘Don't Want to Be a Fool’.

Then drummer Buddy Williams, also with Roberta Flack (and the drummer on the Vandross demos) suggested Marcus audition for the Saturday Night Live [a US TV institution] band.

“So I went and auditioned and got the job,” continues Marcus, who was just 19 at the time. “And then they brought David Sanborn into the band, and that’s when I got to meet David – it was a great band. Howard Shore [the future Academy Award winning film composer] was the bandleader, Howie Johnson was like a co-bandleader, there was Paul Shaffer on keys and [drummer] Buddy Williams was in the band too. It was a great group.

"The first season was a difficult because John Belushi had just died, so it was a bit of a 'down season', but for the next series Eddie Murphy showed up – Saturday Night Live has a history of actors and comedians getting their start, and I got to witness one... I got to see Eddie do his first comedy sketch right there in the studio, it was an incredible experience [as a result of that sketch, Murphy became a regular SNL cast member from 1980 to 1984]. We played behind everybody from Aretha Franklin to Andraé Crouch, the gospel singer, songwriter, arranger, and pastor. We jammed with Blondie, it was a pretty cool experience. And then I got the call from Miles [Davis], so after a couple of years with Saturday Night Live I left to play with him.”

The call from Davis was out of the blue, and was totally unexpected: “Miles was already a legend in 1981, but he had been in retirement for about five years, hadn’t played a note; we hadn’t heard from him, and we weren’t sure whether we would ever hear from him again. And all of a sudden, in 1980 we began to hear rumours that Miles was showing up at different clubs and standing in the back listening and that was cool, kind of mysterious – you never knew if Miles was going to show up at one of your gigs! Anyway, I got a call, I was at a recording session with an R&B group, and I got a message from the receptionist saying, 'Call Miles’. I called the number and it was him, and he invited me to a recording session… he said, ‘Can you make a recording session I am about to do that’s going to take place in two hours in Columbia Studios?’ It was a pretty crazy call to receive! I got to the studio and eventually he walked in, he was a legend – my father had all his records, I had studied all of his music because I was a jazz fanatic myself, my family revered
and adored Miles – it was just an incredible thing to get a call from him.

“He wasn’t interested in playing the music I had grown up listening to, because Miles was the type of artist who every five or six years would change things; so now, trying to figure out what he wanted was an adventure in itself. He would give you instructions that weren’t really clear, so you had to just figure it out on your own.

"I stayed in his band for two years and it was exciting because he had been in retirement for so long and everybody was excited to see him. It was incredible to travel with him, and see the effect he had on people all around the world, we were playing to huge audiences, in Japan – one concert was attended by eight thousand people... Jeez! And when we played France it was like the return of the king! It was really beautiful and pretty cool to be part of that experience. After The Man With the Horn, we did Saturday Night Live with Miles, so I got to come back again and see my old buddies and introduce them to Miles as a graduate of the show! I stayed in Davis’ band for a couple more years and I said, ‘Hey man, I want to develop more as a composer and a producer... he gave me his blessing.”

Now a family man – he had four children to think of, and family is hugely important to him – Marcus was able to increase his income stream by producing and arranging albums for his buddy Luther Vandross and return to studio session work as a bassist and producer.

“I’d wake up early, get to the studio and work till about 4 or 5pm, and then go home to be with my family until about 9 or 10pm, and then go back to the studio and work till around 2am. You have to do everything you have to do.”

Then, in 1985, things were set to change again. Success depends in part in being at the right place at the right time, and Marcus was in precisely the right place at precisely the right time to receive a call from legendary record producer and A&R man, Tommy Lipuma.

“Miles had been on Columbia Records for a very long time, and he left, and he went to Warner Brothers and he decided he wanted to change [his music] again. Tommy was the one who called me up and said, ‘Miles wants to do something different,’ and he played me a piece by George Duke that was very contemporary-sounding, so I said, ‘Oh wow, yes, I’d love to do something.’

“So I put together a demo, and I did the demo the same way I would do my R&B demos, because I was working and producing for Luther Vandross, writing music for people like David Sanborn and Dizzy Gillespie and stuff like that, and I played all the instruments so you could hear what the piece would sound like via the demo. So I played the demos for Tommy and he said, 'Miles is going to love this,’ so I said, ‘Okay, when is the band coming in?’ And he said, ‘No, I want it to sound exactly like your demo, how did you do the demo?’ And I said, ‘I played the stuff myself’. So he said, ‘Okay, well get all your instruments and get them to the studio.’ So yeah, I had the bass, I had the keyboards, I had the horns – I put a lot of keyboards on that.”

At the time Miller had an association with Jason Miles, who was totally into electronic sounds. “I would say to Jason, ‘Give me an ethereal sound. Oh that’s great, I’ll put that on there,’ so it went along like that. I came up with the piece, ‘Tutu’, and I’d call Miles in, and I’d sit at the microphone with him, and I write out lines for him to try against the track, and we’d go back and forth, and once Miles played what he played I’d go back in and add stuff to support what he played, so yeah, it was kind of back and forth, and that began my second relationship, working on the album together, just me and Miles sitting in the studio together.”

Although Davis’ involvement in the album was small, his name was on it and when released in 1986, Tutu won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance.

Written and arranged by Marcus, except for ‘Tomaas’ (co-written by Davis), ‘Backyard Ritual’ (by George Duke), and ‘Perfect Way’ (by pop group Scritti Politti), the opening few bars of the composition ‘Tutu’ was then, and still is, the most dramatic opening to a jazz album in 40 years. It renewed interest in Davis’ comeback, along with the subsequent film soundtrack album Siesta from 1987 (credited to Miles Davis and Marcus Miller – the first time Davis shared an album credit since his collaborations with Gil Evans between 1957 and 1963). On their final collaboration, Amandla from 1989, Marcus wrote and arranged all the tracks except two. And on Miller’s own album The Sun Don’t Lie, released 1993, Davis guested on ‘Rampage.’

In an interesting postscript to his association with Davis, Marcus formed a band comprising Christian Scott on trumpet, Alex Han on saxophones, Federico González Peña on keyboards and Louis Cato on drums for a Tutu Revisited concert tour between May and August 2010, telling Jazz Times, “I'm finding that although the music mirrored the times in which it was created, there is so much in the music that still seems relevant today. Although we've replaced some of the super electro sounding elements, the melodies are still very cool. It feels like they have withstood the test of time. People seem to be feeling this music 20 years later.”

In a career not short of major highlights, Marcus cites Grover Washington Jr as a greatly undervalued talent today.

“People who were incidental to the scene to a certain extent, 30 years later you see represented as ‘the icon of that past era,’ and you go, ‘Well he was there, but he wasn’t the man!’ Grover is a perfect example,” he points out. Marcus appeared on six albums Washington recorded between 1979 and 1985, including the blockbuster Winelight.

“Grover literally created a genre. He was just doing sessions, and he was called to pay baritone sax on a Hank Crawford record in the mid-1970s, and for some reason Hank Crawford didn’t show up, and Creed Taylor, the producer, said, ‘Grover, have you got your alto?’ ‘Yes, I’ve got my alto,’ ‘Well you play on these sessions then.’ And that was Inner City Blues, and that was Grover’s first hit. And the next thing you knew Grover created this genre, funk-jazz – you would hear ‘Mr Magic,’ which was one of his hits, you’d hear it on the jazz stations, the R&B stations and you’d hear it in the park in the summertime, it was just everywhere.”

Another artist Marcus rates highly is the late Wayne Shorter: “He’s one of the premier composers in jazz,” he says, citing his time producing, performing on bass guitar and bass clarinet, and conducting the large orchestra on Shorter’s High Life as an experience he will never forget.

“A few years after Tutu, Tommy LiPuma said, ‘Are you interested in working with Wayne?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to.’ This was 1994 and I ended up staying at Wayne’s house for like months, because he was really diving into his compositions, and you realised that the stuff we had heard from Wayne, up to that point, was just the tip of the iceberg. Now he was diving deeper, writing music for the album that would become High Life.

"And I’d go there and he’d have reams of music papers on the piano, under the piano, and my job was to help him organise this stuff and sometimes I’d have to tell him, ‘Okay Wayne, that’s enough for this piece’. He’d have about 14 pages of music, and he'd say, ‘Let’s start another piece rather than keep adding to this one,’ he was a fountain of creativity; ‘Okay, okay, you’re right Marcus, that’s enough of that.’ And I’d come back the next day, and he would say: ‘I’ve just written four more pages!’ High Life gives you more of an idea of what was really going on in his mind, and he went on to expand on that afterwards, but I feel High Life was a real turning point for him, a beautiful album with beautiful compositions.”

But of Miller's accomplishments, one that gives him special satisfaction was becoming a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2012.

“I was performing a piece called ‘Gorée’ in Paris, which I had written after visiting the island of Gorée, which is off the coast of Senegal. On the island they have a slave house where they used to stockpile Africans before sending them off on the ships into slavery. I told everyone what the piece was about before I played it, and the UNESCO people came backstage after, and said, ‘Guess who’s going to be our next Artist for Peace? Not only that, but we want you to become the spokesperson for our The Slave Route project.’ This was to raise awareness of the transatlantic slave trade, because lots of people in younger generations didn’t know the details of it.

"So I didn’t just accept the title and do a couple of speeches, I really tried to put some weight behind it with me being the spokesperson. I did an album called Afrodesia which I dedicated to raising awareness of the slave trade.

"What I did was collect various musicians who came from various stops along the slave trade route, so I played with some musicians from West Africa, some musicians from the Caribbean, South America, from New Orleans.”

This interview originally appeared in the July 2023 issue of Jazzwise magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today