Official Bio
Mark Miller plays saxophones, flutes and shakuhachi, the traditional bamboo flute of Japan. He has performed and recorded with a wide variety of improvising artists including Art Lande, Tuck and Patti, David Friesen, David Darling, Paul McCandless, Bill Douglas, Peter Kater, Native American flutist R. Carlos Nakai, Tibetan flutist Nawang Khechog and poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman.
Mark Miller holds an M.F.A. degree from California Institute of the Arts and is currently Professor of Music at Naropa University, a Buddhist inspired liberal arts college in Boulder, Colorado.
How I Play: A Personal History
I don't remember a time when I wasn't playing or learning to play an instrument. Since childhood, I've given serious consideration to the trumpet, piano, ukulele, banjo, guitar, flute, saxophone, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, wind synthesizer and (finally) the Japanese shakuhachi. When I graduated from high school, I considered myself a vocalist.
My father loved Frank Sinatra. I remember his Magnavox headphones, his Tanquerey martinis, Frank on the stereo, a kind of musical ecstasy. My mother was (and is) a fine classical flutist. My mother's brother played guitar and the whole family sang folk songs in the living room after dinner. Housewife's Lament, Oleana, Blow the Candle Out, Freight Train. Very sweet, very tender, lots of feeling. Not very hip, I guess, but I loved the singing.
My institutional training was on classical flute and jazz saxophone, but more important to me was my non-traditional training, including playing and listening to music in the jazz clubs and bars around the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 70s: Keystone Korner, Great American Music Hall, The Inn of the Beginning and other, now forgotten rooms. I heard memorable sets of music from Miles Davis, Dave Liebman, Joe Henderson, Betty Carter, Bill Evans, The Rubisa Patrol and many others. Jazz is at its best in small venues, where playing and listening is an intensely personal experience.
Also formative was the thriving San Francisco rock music scene of that time. I heard Jimi Hendrix at Winterland, Janis Joplin, Santana, Jefferson Airplane and other Bay Area bands at Fillmore West. Anyone could start a band and create any kind of music. I wanted to do it, too. My uncle took me shopping for a guitar at a pawnshop in Oakland. I chose a green Stella with hard steel strings and I was gone.
I borrowed my mother's flute and tried improvising with my friends in my parent's garage. Somehow, I got hold of an album by the jazz flutist Jeremy Steig and another by the Bulgarian Jazz Quartet featuring flutist Simeon Shterev. The high school band director loaned me Take Five, by Dave Brubeck and The Shape of Jazz to Come, by Ornette Coleman. Such was my introduction to jazz.
A Transformative Moment
I studied jazz harmony and theory with a very good piano player and teacher who lived on the peninsula. I was doing what jazz musicians did. I practiced six hours a day. I learned standards and modern jazz pieces in all twelve keys- Stella, Freedom Jazz Dance, blues and rhythm changes. I learned patterns. I practiced my scales and modes and arpeggios. I learned about chords and chord substitutions. I listened to records. I transcribed. And then I met Art Lande.
My friend Cookie Marenco took me to the Inn of the Beginning, up in Sonoma County, to listen to The Rubisa Patrol (Art Lande, piano, Mark Isham, trumpet, Kurt Wortman, drums, Bill Douglass, bass). As we walked in, the band was taking suggestions from the audience and improvising a piece about a bird on a mountain. The band's improvisations were completely uninhibited, utterly open, fresh and creative. Their compositions were complex and non-idiomatic, influenced by all kinds of music and no kind of music: jazz standards, modern jazz, blues, traditional Bulgarian, traditional Chinese, twelve-tone, rock, funk, folk and free improvisation. The music was lyrical, rhythmically intense, harmonically sophisticated, and completely unpretentious. The music had humor, great beauty and emotional intensity while remaining completely ecumenical regarding style and musical vocabulary, all of which created a feeling of liberation and delight in the listener. I started to study and play with Art Lande.
With Art I could play what I wanted to hear; I didn't have to play what I (or anyone else) thought I "should" play. I started to understand that jazz is a vehicle, not a destination. Instead of narrowing and refining my sense of what I thought jazz was or should be, I started to open outward, to follow my natural musicality. I started to relax and enjoy the unfolding, the unknowing and the limitless possibilities of open improvisation.
Devotion to the Unknown
My friend and colleague, the painter Joan Anderson says that, "art is always about devotion to the unknown." As a student, I was committed to knowing. I wanted to know the "right" notes to play and the "right" way to play them. Today I'm more interested in the unknown. As the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy said, "That's where the music has to be- on the edge- in between the known and the unknown." I'm devoted to exploring that edge.
Thirty-five years after meeting Art Lande, I'm still captivated by the magnificence and benevolence of Art's creative gift. As he plays, as we play together, the universe burns, the universal elements and forces reveal themselves, love flows and my musical path is realized as the gift of music circulates for the benefit of listeners and musicians alike. I can't imagine any other way to play.
Coda
Music mirrors the essential energies of being. As improvisers, we find no end, no limit, only unknowable possibility and a limitless universal creativity. Our job is to stop, look deeply at ourselves and at the world around us, and to play the elemental music of now, the music of this moment.
By emphasizing the devotional aspect of music, I don't mean to diminish the role of learning and practice or to devalue the meaning of tradition. Good musicianship is essential to the realization of good music. But technique, theory and tradition are not the music. Too often they are taught as if they were. Music making includes both the inner world of the creative imagination and the outer realities of instrumental technique, theory, tradition and collaboration with other musicians. Teaching and learning should address all of these elements.
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