Five-time Grammy Award winner Marcus Miller is returning to Australia next April, with the bassist, composer and producer announcing a five-date national headline tour.
For more than four decades, Miller’s name has appeared alongside a remarkable cross-section of jazz, funk, soul and R&B. Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers, Chaka Khan and Beyoncé are among the artists with whom he has worked, but reducing Miller to the company he has kept misses a substantial part of the story.
He has long been an artist in his own right.
Miller’s relationship with Miles Davis remains one of the defining chapters of his career. As bassist, composer and producer, he played an important role in Davis’s 1980s work, most notably on 1986 album Tutu, a record Miller largely composed and produced and which helped reshape Davis’s sound for another era.
His work has travelled considerably further than jazz. Miller produced and wrote for Luther Vandross, worked extensively as a session musician and composer, created film scores and steadily developed his own catalogue as a bandleader. Five Grammy Awards have followed, alongside his appointment as a UNESCO Artist for Peace.
Australian audiences most recently saw Miller at the 2024 Melbourne International Jazz Festival, where his band performed on the festival’s opening night. He returned to the stage later that evening to join Herbie Hancock, bringing together two musicians whose careers intersect with some of the most significant developments in modern jazz.
Next April, however, Miller returns with the focus entirely on his own music.
Across five headline performances, the tour will showcase the combination of jazz, funk, soul and R&B that has come to define his work as a bandleader. Miller’s bass may occupy the centre of the music, but his concerts are built around the interaction of the entire band, leaving compositions open to improvisation and change rather than treating the recorded versions as fixed blueprints.
That sense of movement has helped Miller avoid becoming trapped by his own history. His career gives him every opportunity to trade solely on a formidable back catalogue and an equally formidable list of collaborators, but curiosity has remained a persistent part of his music.
t also makes the prospect of seeing Miller with his own band particularly interesting. Technical brilliance is almost a given at this level; what matters is what musicians choose to do with it. In Miller’s case, virtuosity has always worked best when placed in service of groove, improvisation and the musicians surrounding him.
There is an extraordinary amount of history contained in those four strings. Miller has worked with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, moved through studios with some of soul and R&B’s defining voices and built a parallel career as composer, producer and bandleader.
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