Crescent Discs
Steve Miller - See Hear CD7 CD
In an unfiltered flow from mind to hand, Steve
Miller made music at the speed of
thought. To witness him at a piano keyboard was to be an onlooker at the process
of unadulterated artistic creation, sound flowing from player and instrument in
total
symmetry. Whether solo or with others, he was often no more aware than his
audience of what themes were likely to emerge next or of what the final effect
would be..... He simply played. His spontaneous jazz explorations have an
undeniable alchemy and cut through the routine tools of a listener's perceptions
to paint large on the canvas of the mind's eye. After a lifetime honing his
talents in the vanguard of Britain's experimental music, touring
internationally, playing with some of the most highly regarded musicians and
bands in the field and ranking among the country's foremost exponents of free
jazz, Steve was content to retreat to a gothic church near the home he shared
with his wife Miranda and daughter Stephanie. When he felt the urge, the St
Johns Arts and Recreation Centre in nearby Harlow provided a perfect outlet for
more public experimentation. Born on the Isle of Wight to musical parents, he
encountered jazz through a Derbyshire prep school classics master who would
occasionally commandeer the institution's piano for his own pleasure and, moving
on to a London school, found himself gravitating towards a weekly jazz club in
Ealing where he got a first taste of his musical potential one night when the
band took a break “I dared to go up on the stage and started playing. The band
left their beer and got back up and started playing with
me. I realised they understood what I was doing. They were seasoned musicians
and just knew how to fit in straight away, intuitively, with the ability to
improvise.” With his brother Phil and drummer Pip Pyle, he formed his first
band, Delivery, in 1966 and
caught the ear of Alexis Korner after opening for him. Invited to support on
further dates, Steve found himself doubling up in a duo with Korner, later
touring Germany with him and Robert Plant, who went on to front Led Zeppelin.
With Delivery on the back burner in 1971, he joined the widely regarded Caravan
for a brief spell after keyboard/harmony vocalist Dave Sinclair left the quartet
and put his mark on it so thoroughly that its direction all but changed,
certainly during the period in which it produced the album “Waterloo Lily.” He
left Caravan in 1972 and embarked on a number of partnerships, most notably the
Steve Miller/Lol Coxhill
Duo, the sprawling avant garde big band FF, which featured anything up to 18
musicians, the Steve Miller/Mark Hewins Duo in 1983 and eventually the Steve
Miller Trio/Quartet, reflecting his desire to constantly explore new influences
and resulting
in the album “Millers Tale.” In the '90s he performed under a variety of guises
including the Steve Miller Quartet, Steve Miller and Friends and, most recently,
as the nucleus of K.Ostra, a more muscular experiment with local musicians also
released on
Voiceprint. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer of 1998, Steve
brought to bear a quiet philosophical determination that it wouldn't get the
better of him. It didn't and, even as it took its toll, he continued to work
with the recordings for this collection
with regular engineer Steve Lane and friend Hag. “In my music I have a sense
that I’ve got something to say. I’m down at the piano with no idea of what I’m
trying to do but a strong desire to do it anyway,” he said in his final
interview in late Autumn of that
year. “I might be rather Utopian and I do have an ideal which is rather
pastoral; quite a lot of my music is like that - it's a dialogue with myself
about the way things are. It sort of focuses the mind and changes the chemistry
in your brain. Afew seconds before
you start it really comes on strong. The first note comes out and that's the one
I’m committed to. “Once you're up and started you can’t just bring it to a
finish; you get a lot of energy from uncertainty and you have to play it to the
end.” Steve Miller died on December 9th, 1998 at the age of 55.