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Doug Miller
In a town that boasts an unusually large number of top-tier jazz musicians, Doug Miller was one of Seattle’s most respected bass players for 23 years. A mainstay of that regional jazz scene for two decades, Doug appeared in concerts, clubs, clinics and on recordings with many of the world’s leading jazz musicians including James Moody, Ken Peplowski, George Cables, Ray Vega, and Dick Hyman, and he has toured with the Count Basie Orchestra, the Ellington Orchestra, and Ernestine Anderson. He’s a founding member of the critically-acclaimed trio New Stories, and of Big Neighborhood, a quartet that played twenty-first century jazz by merging unusual elements in collage-like compositions that combined unusual energy with edgy improvisation. Doug is also a composer whose compositions are widely recorded, and an educator and former member of the faculty of the University of Washington, where he taught for eight years.
Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Doug is a direct musical descendant of Ray Brown, the pioneering bebop musician who set the standard for jazz bass throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Inspired by the great jazz bands led by David Baker at Indiana University in the late 1960s and early 1970s (which included musicians such as the Brecker brothers), Doug took up the jazz trumpet while in sixth grade and started playing electric bass a few years later. While Doug was in tenth grade, he heard Ray Brown protege and I.U. student John Clayton. Doug began studying with Clayton, who has gone on to become one of the most renowned jazz musicians of the modern era, and Clayton has long been one of Doug’s most important mentors.
Doug studied classical bass at the Indiana University, studying with Murray Grodner, Eugene Levinson and Stuart Sankey. Afterwards he moved to Indianapolis, where he worked as a full-time musician. In 1982, Doug moved to New York City. He worked steadily for the next two and a half years in New York, playing with Mel Lewis, appearing regularly with the piano player Ram Ramirez (composer of the beautiful jazz standard “Lover Man”), and working with a wide range of top players in bebop and Brazilian jazz.
In 1987, Doug moved to Seattle. Following a recommendation from Clayton, Doug contacted Buddy Catlett, the great Seattle bass player who had recorded with Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Coleman Hawkins. With encouragement from Catlett, Doug was soon playing regularly at Lofurno’s and other Seattle jazz spots.
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From: RegenerationBy Doug Miller