Marcus Miller (born William Henry Marcus Miller Jr., June 14, 1959, Brooklyn, New York) is an American jazz musician, composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist.
Miller is best known as a bassist, working with trumpeter Miles Davis, singer Luther Vandross, and saxophonist David Sanborn, as well as maintaining a prolific solo career. Miller is classically trained as a clarinetist and also plays keyboards, saxophone andguitar.
Miller spent approximately 15 years performing as a sideman or session musician and observing how great band leaders operated. During that time he also did a lot of arranging and producing. During the late seventies he was a member of the Saturday Night Live band from 1978 through 1979. Miller's contribution to signature tunes is legendary. The intro on Aretha Franklin's 'I wanna make it up to you' just to name one. He has played on over 500 recordings defining the baseline of the music of such greats as Luther Vandross, Grover Washington Jr., Roberta Flack, Carly Simon,McCoy Tyner, Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol. He won the "Most Valuable Player" award, (awarded byNARAS to recognize studio musicians) three years in a row and was subsequently awarded "player emeritus" status and retired from eligibility. In the nineties, Miller began to record his own records, he had to put a band together to take advantage of touring opportunities.
Miller's proficiency on his main instrument, the bass guitar, is generally well-regarded. Not only has Miller been involved in the continuing development of the technique known as "slapping", particularly his "thumb" technique, but his fretless bass technique has also served as an inspiration to many, and has taken the fretless bass into musical contexts and genres previously unexplored on the electric bass. The influences of some of the previous generation of electric bass players, such as Larry Graham, Stanley Clarke, and Jaco Pastorius, are audible in Miller's playing. Early in his career, Miller was accused of being simply imitative of Pastorius, but has since more fully integrated the latter's methodology into his own sound.
Miller has an extensive discography, and tours frequently and widely in Europe and Japan.
Between 1988 and 1990 he appeared in the first season and again toward the end as both the musical director and also as the house band bass player in The Sunday Night Band during the two seasons of the acclaimed music performance program Sunday Night on NBC late-night television.
As a composer, Miller wrote "Tutu" for Miles Davis, a piece that defined Davis's career in the late 1980s, and was the title track of Davis's album Tutu, upon which Miller wrote all the songs with only two exceptions, and one of those was co-written with Davis. He also composed "Chicago Song" for David Sanborn and co-wrote "'Til My Baby Comes Home", "It's Over Now", "For You to Love", and "Power of Love" forLuther Vandross. Miller also wrote "Da Butt", which was featured in Spike Lee's School Daze.
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