Moving Forward: A Conversation with Marcus Miller (Part Two)

We continue our dialogue with legendary bassist Marcus Miller with a focus on his current and more recent projects from his many film scores to the supergroup Mega Nova with Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Cindy Blackman Santana. He also shares his thoughts on genre and how his Sirius XM show “Miller Time” can expose great music to new appreciative audiences.

PostGenre: Since you have indicated you are waiting to create a new album until you can see the brighter side of current events, what have you been working on lately? 

Marcus Miller: I have been doing virtual appearances and little things. I am also about to get into scoring some documentaries and films on really fascinating historical people. I’m really happy about those projects because they seem to be part of this era too; revisiting the lives of certain historical figures or visiting them for the first time.  There are some great people from the past, like Thurgood Marshall, that don’t get enough attention. There’s more stuff like my work on the Marshall film to come. Working on those types of projects is also going to help me because their incredible stories will inspire me and hopefully I can use that inspiration to springboard into my next move.     

PG: Marshall is a really great example. There are many people who never learned about Thurgood Marshall. There are even some lawyers who did not know of him in any meaningful way until law school. It is really insane.  

MM: Yeah, shoot, right? And you know, the thing about Marshall is that we know about Martin and Malcom; people who were really genius at articulating the problem, particularly Malcom. But on the other side of that coin was Thurgood who was working from the inside. You always need an inside man. [laughing]. And Thurgood Marshall got so much done from the inside that people don’t talk about in terms of using established precedent, including racist decisions from the past, to put together arguments to help win cases like Brown v. Board of Education or the other great things he worked on. He got a lot done, but in a really quiet kind of way. And I think that story needs to be told as well.  

PG: Speaking of scores, you have composed them for many films, TV shows, and other projects. What do you like most about score composing and how do you feel it influences your other music? 

MM: I like it a lot. I like that it takes the focus off of you as an artist. Instead, you’re mostly trying to help the director tell a story. 

I also like that using my music to support storytelling will sometimes force me to use colors that I wouldn’t ordinarily, like adding string quartets or the English horn. I often find myself bringing those colors back to my other music – albums or live performances. Working on scores really ends up opening you up musically and I really enjoy that about it.

PG: To ask about another project you worked on fairly recently, what is the backstory on Mega Nova? Are there really no plans for it to be more than a one-time thing or result in an album release?

 MM: Well, Herbie [Hancock] is the artistic director for the Jazz program at the Hollywood Bowl.  It runs through the whole summer. I think Carlos [Santana] was doing an interview and someone asked him what were in his plans.  He just started riffing and said he was putting a band together with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Marcus Miller, and Cindy Blackman Santana, and that it was going to be called Mega Nova then went on with his day.  But then he started getting phone calls asking if the band was going to happen. Herbie also started getting calls and decided to get the band together for one evening at the Hollywood Bowl as part of their summer series. It was nice. A lot of people don’t realize Carlos Santana is a huge jazz fan. A big John Coltrane fan.  

PG: He even recorded Swing of Delight (Columbia, 1989) with Miles’ Second Great Quintet sans Miles, done some performances with Wayne, and released Illuminations (Columbia, 1974) with Alice Coltrane, Jack Dejohnette, and Dave Holland.

MM: Yeah, exactly. So Carlos was really really into us forming a jazz group. It was an opportunity for him to kind of stretch out.  And we dug it too. But we also told Carlos we have to do “Black Magic Woman” and a few other songs or we would never make it out of the Bowl. [laughing] So, we did a combination of stuff that I think Carlos always wanted to do and ended up with his hits just to make sure the Bowl was left satisfied.  

PG: You have described your music as “funk on the bottom and jazz on top.” While that is a great description, it also implies a division between the two. Do you think jazz and funk are fundamentally divided or just different ways of looking at the same thing?

MM: Jazz, Funk, R&B, Hip hop. They are really all the same music just with different points of emphasis. It’s all black music. 

Look at the connections between jazz and R&B. After the second verse of a song, R&B singers often begin essentially improvising, they just don’t call it improvisation. Instead, they call it ad-libs. But regardless of the name, the singer basically improvises and sings whatever seems appropriate in the moment. Jazz has taken improvisation to a whole other level, but the basic concept is the same.

The description of my music as “funk on the bottom and jazz on top,” is largely to appeal to people who need labels to understand what they are hearing.

But that’s not to say there aren’t some differences.If you play the drums, you better know the difference between jazz and funk. As a bass player, it is not much fun to play funk with a jazz drummer who doesn’t understand the language. They’re reacting to everything in the music. Dude, we don’t need you to play the melody on the damn snare drum, you know? Just hold the beat. There is a discipline you must have as a funk drummer that is different from a jazz drummer.

Also, you can always distinguish between a jazz musician who has never played R&B or the Blues and one who has. You can always identify a jazz musician who has never had the responsibility of keeping people dancing. I think, to a large degree, that’s what separates John Coltrane from all the Coltrane imitators. From listening to him, you can tell that at some point Trane had to walk the bar and play in blues joints. He had that feeling in his experience, in his body. No matter how far “out” he got, his music was always grounded in the blues and R&B. Miles Davis too.

Here’s another way to think of it. If I go visit my family in South Carolina, I might start talking a little differently. I might add some “y’alls” and a little bit of a Southern accent to my speech. But when I get back up to New York, I’m back to my usual way of speaking. I’m still the same dude in both places, it’s just that different parts of my family have different emphasis. It’s the same thing with music.

PG: One thing that’s noticeable with your music is how it pulls from a bunch of diverse ideas. Laid Black (Blue Note, 2019) explored a ground between jazz, funk, trap and hip hop. And before that, the excellent song “Blast”  [(Marcus (Concord, 2008)] borrowed sounds from all over the world. How do you know whether different musical ideas will fit well together? 

MM: You just know it right away. Just like how rappers can hear a crazy sample and know it is something they can rap over. Maybe you beef up the beat a little bit or adjust it in some other way. But there is just something about the underlying sound that seems familiar. Timbaland heard those Indian samples that he started using back in the day and something about it just felt familiar to him. You just feel it.  

PG: What do you enjoy most about presenting your weekly SiriusXM radio show “Miller Time”?

MM: Well, my biggest beef with jazz is how it’s kind of such an inside thing. There’s a few people who have been anointed- taught jazz by their parents, an uncle, or someone else close to them or maybe they took a jazz appreciation course in college or whatever- as understanding jazz. The people who are jazz lovers and understand jazz and its history often don’t seem like they have a real interest in hipping other people to it. They love being different and not being like the “regular people” who listen to pop music and all that stuff. And this leaves most people without that jazz background thinking that they’ll never understand jazz or, even worse, feeling like they don’t want to understand it. 

For me, that’s a big problem. The way I got turned into jazz was because it was cool. The stories and characters were amazing and it was a whole fascinating world. With Miller Time, I hoped I could open up that world and present it to people who may be open to it but don’t necessarily know a lot about it.

PG: Why do you think there is a harsher learning curve to jazz than other music? 

MM: Well, one thing you can’t fight is human physiology. Whether people like it or not, the voice is the primary means of human communication. Because of this, instrumental music automatically loses a huge percentage of listeners who need to hear a voice. They’re waiting for someone to sing. 

The next form of human communication is rhythm. Rhythm may have even developed before the voice. Who knows. But  rhythm is really important. And the thing about funk, R&B, and hip hop is that the beat is undeniable. The beat  is clear. With jazz, especially much of it being made today,  that’s not so much the case and some people will disregard the music because of that. 

So, there are clear natural limitations  to the immediate appeal of the music. But to make up for that, jazz is so interesting and beautiful. There is so much people can say in jazz. 

If you’re a hip hop guy, John Coltrane’s gonna blow your mind when somebody puts him in the right context for you. It’s not like you need to take a college course to understand his music, but at least know enough about its context to better understand the music.  Take A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1964). By the time he made the album, Kennedy had been shot and people are already plotting against Martin. Malcom is on the scene. Hippies. The old way of things is increasingly questioned and challenged. Ok, now listen to Coltrane with that context.  [laughing]. The listener would be like “DAMN!”

Or maybe go back a few years and play “My Favorite Things.” Maybe the listener recognizes the melody of the song from The Sound of Music. Now take it to the early 1960s. Coltrane is busting out at the seams. He’s played every chord change he could ever play. He’s already made Giant Steps (Atlantic, 1960). Now listen to how he dismantles this song. The melody is a handlebar for the new listener, but listen to what the group does with it. All of that stuff is fascinating. I just try to bring a little of that to Miller Time. People can tell I really dig the music from how I talk about it and maybe that makes them want to listen to the music more. 

PG: One final question. If you could perform with anyone you had not been able to, who would it be and why? 

MM: Well, I caught a lot of the great jazz musicians from the 60s and 70s towards the end of their lives. Among others, I was fortunate to have played with Dizzy Gillespie, Slim Gaillard, Jimmy Cobb, Walter Bishop, Jr., a trumpet player named Dizzy Reece,  and, of course,  Miles. 

And even those I didn’t get to play with I got to experience.  When I was 18, the Village Vanguard would let me sit on their steps instead of paying the cover to get in. On those stairs, I listened to artists like Bill Evans, Dexter Gordon, and Woody Shaw. I caught the very end of the era and it was incredible.  

But if I had a chance to play with anyone, it would have been my cousin, Wynton Kelly. Wynton played piano for Miles in the late 50’s and early 60s then went on to have his own trio with West Montgomery. I was around 11 or 12 when he passed and hadn’t started playing music yet. I would have loved to have been able to play with him. That would have been awesome.  

PG: Is it  true that one of the first things you ever said to Miles was that you were related to Wynton Kelly?  

MM: Yeah, I figured that was a great opening line. The hardest thing at first was what do I say to this cat? That didn’t seem too bad of a place to start [laughing].

More information on Marcus Miller can be found on his website.

The excellent documentary Marcus is currently available on Amazon Prime.

Stay tuned for more with Marcus as part of a special Miles Davis focused project planned for later this year.