Marcus Miller: “We Want Miles” Centennial Celebration

Among the great electric bassists in the history of the instrument, Marcus Miller is a jazz renaissance man.  He was instrumental to Miles Davis’s resurgence in the 1980s and helps us celebrate Miles’s centennial with music from Davis’s landmark 1982 live double album We Want Miles, along with classic Miles compositions spanning from the 1950s right up to his final era of Tutu in 1986 and Amandla in 1989 both of which Marcus Miller composed and produced.  He will be joined by other members of Miles Davis’s 1980s comeback band guitarist Mike Stern, saxophonist Bill Evans and percussionist Mino Cinelu. 

A wildly prolific studio musician and bandleader, Miller and his distinctive bass virtuosity have been heard on well over 500 sessions for a dizzying array of major artists including Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and McCoy Tyner to Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, and Luther Vandross. He first appeared with Davis on the trumpeter’s 1980 comeback The Man with the Horn and went on to produce and largely compose Davis’s three late 80s albums Tutu (1986), Music from Siesta (1987), and Amandla (1989).  

1982’s double live We Want Miles is a document of Davis’s first live performances after his self-imposed six-year retirement, culled from recordings in Boston, New York, and Tokyo and featuring two versions of the now-classic tracks “Jean-Pierre,” “Back Seat Betty,” and the Gershwin standard “My Man’s Gone Now.”