Reed Miller

Prof. Faddis

Topics In Jazz

9/6/17

My Life In Music: An Autobiography

My first musical memories come from hearing my father, an amateur pianist, regularly

playing jazz standards at home. On a regular basis he would practice everything from Duke

Ellington to Great American Songbook tunes by Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. I spent

many evening in early childhood listening to my father hold court at the piano and found the

music fascinating. My father was an avid music lover and rock musician. At an early age my

father exposed me to a wide swath of musical styles as I accompanied him to the recording

studios, rehearsals, and performances of his blues-rock groups. However, despite the availability

of instruments in my home and saturation with music I was not quick to pick up an instrument.

While I had early encouragement to play music, and offers of lessons on piano around

age seven, and clarinet around age nine, I was reluctant as a child to play music. That changed

when at age ten I was struck enough by my parents’ recordings of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton,

and Jimmy Page to pick up the jumbo-acoustic guitar laying around the house and begin to

attempt to play it. My father claims to have discouraged me from practicing the guitar instead of

a woodwind. The power and physical connection of creating sound with wire and wood kept my

interest enough to practice on the oversized acoustic guitar for a year before moving to a more

appropriately sized instrument.

I was interested in learning more about jazz at a young age and by eleven began to play

guitar in my local junior high school big band in Normal, Illnois a small farm town. Perhaps
because of the history of territory swing band, or possibly just the commercialization of jazz

education, there exists a robust program of junior high-school jazz big bands in the state of

Illinois. At least, the programs are robust in participation if not quality. I benefited greatly from

exposure to big-band charts and basic sight-reading for the first time at eleven.

It was in middle school that I had my first nascent exposure to simplified arrangements of

the music of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. At that age I learned about new music through the

jazz education monolith. I have a distinct memory of my middle school band director explaining

Freddie Green style comping to my wide-eyed and confused eleven-year-old self. Partly thanks

to state jazz competitions and also to naivety, all of Charlie Parker’s collected output could be

summarized in the melodies of “Billie’s Bounce” and “Au Privave,” while “A Night In Tunisia”

summarized Dizzy Gillespie. My first exposure to jazz guitar came from listening to a

compilation of Wes Montgomery’s Riverside recordings and a collection of Charlie Christian

with Benny Goodman. Wes’ music and approach to the guitar was a revelation for me. At the

time I was more concerned with learning Stairway To Heaven than “West Coast Blues” or

“Airegin,” but Wes was the first jazz musician who made a significant impact on my ear that

pushed me to practice. Looking back on my early exposure to jazz and rudimentary guitar

lessons during middle school my experiences yielded little in the way of musical development. It

was not until almost-accidental matriculation into the local performing arts high school that I

would explore jazz or technical facility on the guitar.

Moving from Normal, Illinois, a small and rural mid-western town with minimal culture

or diversity to speak of, to Greenville, South Carolina in the foothills of the southern

Appalachians was a major culture shock. Ten years removed from my relocation to the south I

still feel at a distance from the culture and norms of life below the Mason-Dixon line. My family
relocated somewhat unexpectedly in fall 2008, but I had enough experience with jazz to gain

admittance into the local magnet performing arts high school. For the next four years, I spent

every weekday afternoon studying jazz for high school credit. The experience was an incredible

privilege that dramatically altered the trajectory of my life. A former L.A. session guitarist who

found success in the late 70’s and early 80’s runs the program, and consequently, the student

body skewed heavily towards guitarists. Within my freshman year, I was exposed to a wide

variety of jazz musicians and began finding inspiration from guitarists like Jim Hall, George

Benson, Grant Green, and Pat Metheny. Between the program director, visiting artists like Chuck

Loeb, and successful former students there was no shortage of role models for musicians in the

program. Suddenly a life in music seemed like a viable career path.

While many young musicians have developed to a far greater capacity with fewer

resources, this jazz program proved a fertile place for developing an understanding of music

theory, jazz harmony, and gaining more facility on the guitar. Thanks to the incredible

reinforcement for studying jazz I had more or less abandoned rock music by 15. I was a good

student in high school, but more of my time went towards practicing and transcription than

anything else. Thanks to my very supportive family I had the opportunity to attend a variety of

jazz workshops during high school. At seventeen a scholarship award towards attending Berklee

College of Music from one such workshop further bolstered my confidence to pursue music.

Despite the nurturing atmosphere of the art program, I suffered severe stage fright throughout

high school. My anxiety was a significant and mildly a debilitating fact of life for me until deep

into my undergraduate degree. As a teenager, I would often visibly shake during a performance,

during audition or jury situations to casual performances, to the point of hardly being able to
play. The sheer enthusiasm the jazz and guitar helped me persist through those years and led me

to pursue jazz in higher education.

Auditioning for college jazz programs led me to attend the University of North Texas in

2012. I was thoroughly underprepared for the big-band oriented program that I encountered at

North Texas. Small group playing had been the focus of the program my high-school, and North

Texas’ “Lab Band” ensembles offered me an opportunity to develop my sight-reading. Despite

doing well academically and finishing several underclassman pre-requisites early, my problems

stage fright and nerves during performance persisted. During my sophomore year, I came to

question whether jazz performance was the right track for my education. I found myself

questioning whether the UNT jazz program was continuing the tradition of jazz, or result of 50

years of cultural appropriation and commercialized jazz-education. After the fall of 2013, I

transferred to a Furman University, a small liberal arts university just outside of Greenville

thanks to a tuition-free opportunity. The next year was one of soul-searching and re-evaluation

about my decision to pursue jazz. More broadly it was a year of questioning the value of art in

both my life and society. From roughly age 14-20 I had pursued jazz headfirst without making

many critical inquiries into the validity of my decision-making, and it resulted in a major

disruption in my presumed career path.

How then did I end up pursuing a Masters of Music degree at SUNY Purchase? For all of

its shortcomings - a small program, a limited local jazz scene, a very conservative student body -

my time at Furman was essential to my musical growth. Exposure to a broader range of

academic ideas across liberal arts disciplines helped define for me the value in art-music and

music academia. After a year at Furman, I redoubled my efforts pursue music performance and

explored every performance opportunity available in the small music world of Upstate, South
Carolina. After taking a frank look at my overall musicianship I found a wealth of areas to

improve and found success in musical growth thanks to some diverse situations. Furman

University, for example, is notoriously homogenous and the music department lacking in musical

or ethnic diversity. Through a concerted effort to perform commercial music outside of the

school I found myself playing in mixed R&B bands, Soul and Funk groups, quasi-smooth jazz

groups, and wedding bands to diverse audiences more often than not. Colleagues and

bandleaders from these groups greatly expanded my musical concept beyond jazz-education,

exposed opportunities for growth in my musicianship, and taught me how to embrace and enjoy

performance. Dozens of performances from 2014 to 2016 helped me overcome the anxiety that

plagued my earlier years in music. All the while I was continuing to improve my knowledge

guitar and jazz under the mentorship of the Director of Jazz at Furman Dr. Matt Olson. After 9

semesters between two universities, I graduated from Furman in Fall 2016 intent on continuing

to pursue jazz professionally.