Today we’d like to introduce you to Robert Miller.
Robert, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am the leader/bassist/composer for Project Grand Slam, a Rock Jazz Latin fusion band. We’re based in NYC and we’ve performed at festivals, major venues and clubs around the U.S. and abroad. Nine albums including a Billboard #1 and over 4 million video views.
I come from a musical family – my father played the trumpet and I started out playing the trumpet too. But when the British Invasion hit in the ’60s trumpet suddenly wasn’t very cool and I taught myself guitar and then bass. I took lessons with Jimmy Garrison, Coltrane’s bass player, who introduced me to jazz. In the ’70s I got into the jazz fusion movement.
I completely reorganized PGS in 2015 with a group of young, mainly foreign born musicians and began transitioning the band from instrumentals to mainly vocals with our incredible female vocalist. I also added a kind of musical signature, taking on an iconic song from the ’60s each album and “reimagining” it in our style.
During the pandemic, after all our upcoming performances including a European tour were canceled, I completed a new, as yet unreleased solo album, where I handle all the vocal duties. I’m pleased to say that the pre-release reviews for this album, called “Summer Of Love (2020)”, have been simply stellar.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The life of a musician is anything but smooth! You’ve got to really love what you do in order to stay in this crazy business!
The music world has changed completely over the years. Labels are basically irrelevant now. Hardly anyone buys CDs or downloads anymore. Everything is streaming, which is essentially about giving away your music for free since the reimbursement rates on Spotify are so pathetic. And insofar as playing live now is concerned, all that the promoters ever ask is how many tickets can you sell. I keep thinking that if those four guys from Liverpool came around today and couldn’t sell enough tickets, you never would have heard of them!
Hey, but enough complaining! The upside is that recording is so much easier to do today, and anyone can get their music out there today with no gatekeepers to thwart you. And there are so many online sites and forums that focus on music in all of its niches. As the Dead said you gotta keep on truckin’!
Can you give our readers some background on your music?
I think that Project Grand Slam is unique, which is hard to say in today’s wide world. When people ask me who does the band sounds like I honestly cannot point to any artist in particular. In part, that’s because of my musical philosophy.
I grew up revering those artists – like The Beatles – who constantly evolved their music and with great variety. So many artists seem to find a particular sound and then record the same song over and over. I guess that’s good in one sense, as their fans know exactly what to expect from them. But for me that would be musical hell. I constantly want to stretch and expand my music. A PGS album can easily glide from hard rock to jazz fusion to country jazz to ballads. It sounds like a mishmash but it’s not – we maintain our “sound” or integrity throughout. I think this is a major reason why the critics love us – we take them on a musical journey each album. I know this is against the grain these days, but this is what really distinguishes PGS from the rest.
My new solo album, “Summer Of Love (2020)” is the same. I tried to take the listener on a journey from song to song, but with a powerful thread that hangs it all together. Again, the pre-release reviews have been spectacular.
What were you like growing up?
I was a typical child of the 1960s. Music and baseball were my two biggest interests growing up in NYC. There were three rock and roll AM radio stations in NYC and you could constantly flip back and forth to get all the latest hits. Like I said, musically my world changed forever when the British Invasion hit in the ’60s. Everyone formed a band. My first one was called The Buccaneers. We played at all the Church, Temple and School functions that we could get. All covers straight off the radio.
Like I said, baseball was really important to me. If you grew up when I did in NYC, you were a Yankees fan. It got in your DNA. Mickey Mantle was every kid’s hero.
I grew up in Queens, NY. My neighborhood was a melting pot – roughly 1/3 Italian, 1/3 Irish and 1/3 Jewish. Everyone got along fine. I rode my bike everywhere. A different world.