Chinle Miller

If your a casual listener or a new but impressed listener to Mr Miller then this is a great sorta/kinda hits anthology and it has some really great songs…

Steve Miller had started to essay his classic sound with The Joker, but 1976's Fly Like an Eagle is where he took flight, creating his definitive slice of space blues. The key is focus, even on an album as stylishly, self-consciously trippy as this, since the focus brings about his strongest set of songs (both originals and covers), plus a detailed atmospheric production where everything fits. It still can sound fairly dated – those whooshing keyboards and cavernous echoes are certainly of their time – but its essence hasn't aged, as "Fly Like an Eagle" drifts like a cool breeze, while "Take the Money and Run" and "Rock 'n Me" are fiendishly hooky, friendly rockers.

This CD may be scoffed at by serious jazz listeners, and even by big-band devotees wary of modern "ghost band" performances, but the fact is that it sold over 100,000 pieces when it first appeared in 1983, and its CD version was among the very earliest compact discs ever released commercially in the United States (indeed, so early that the actual CDs had to be imported from Japan). The second-ever release by GRP Records, it put the label on the map, and it also stood as testimony to how good those original arrangements of the Glenn Miller Orchestra were. So how is it as music?

Bass great Marcus Miller brings the influence of modern urban music to his trademark sound on his highly-anticipated, genre-defying new album Laid Black, which will be released June 1 on Blue Note Records. It’s been three years since Miller’s last album, Afrodeezia, which The New York Times called “vibrant and expressive… music that frames his playing beautifully.” Miller says: “Afrodeezia was like a musical voyage through my history. I followed the journey of my ancestors by collaborating with musicians along the African Slave route – musicians from West Africa, North Africa, South America and the Caribbean. With Laid Black, I decided to bring the music right up to the present - using elements from what’s happening in urban music today. So you’ll hear hip-hop, trap, soul, funk, R&B and jazz on this album.

Here we have Canadian musician Rick Miller back with his sixteenth studio album, for which he has kept the same line-up as he had for 2020's "Unstuck In Time".
Pink Floyd has always been an influence, but there is also much on here that one could relate back to early Barclay James Harvest while Alan Parsons Project is also involved somewhere along the line. Miller is crossover in its truest sense in that he has no boundaries and instead goes where ethe muse takes him, so we can be symphonic in some places and folk in others, always with his emotional and haunting vocals bringing the listener deep inside. While many of his influences do reach back in time, this never feels like an album from nearly 50 years ago but instead is fresh and new.

Scottish singer-songwriter Siobhan Miller’s fourth solo album sees her opting for a more stripped- back feel than 2018’s Mercury. In making this latest record, the singer – winner of a 2018 Radio 2 Folk Award and three ‘Singer of the Year’ titles at the Scots Trad Music Awards – made clear her aim: to create something “as raw and honest as possible”. In an effort to capture the atmosphere of her live shows, Miller settles on a mixture of original and traditional songs, recorded live in Glasgow’s Gloworm Studio with engineer Iain Hutchison. Her band consists of Lau’s Kris Drever on guitar & vocals, fiddler Megan Henderson, guitarist Innes White, John Lowrie on piano and Kim Carnie on backing vocals, with Miller’s husband Euan Burton joining on double bass.

Canadian Rick Miller is back with his fourteenth album, two years after 'Delusional'. This is very much a continuation of the change in style he has been working on recently where there is much more of a rock element within his music, and his band is the same as the last album apart from this time around only Barry Haggarty provides guitar, as Kane Miller is no longer involved. Given Kane has been a mainstay since Rick's fourth album, 2004's 'Dreamtigers', that is quite a shift. But Haggarty's relationship with Rick goes back even further, while flautist Sarah Young has also been involved for more than 15 years. Both drummer Will and cellist Mateusz Swoboda also have a long history with Rick, who describes this album as being "in the genre of what I would call Progressive Rock. That term defining the type of music that was made famous throughout the 70's by bands such as Genesis, The Moody Blues and Pink Floyd"…