Mike Miller (guitarist)

Mike Miller (born 1953 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota) is a Los Angeles-based guitarist known for playing various styles of music including jazz fusion, rock, pop and more, and has played with Chick Corea, Bette Midler, Yellowjackets,Gino Vannelli, Vital Information, Karizma (Jazz band), Chad Wackerman, Vinnie Colaiuta, Quincy Jones, Brand X, and Burton Cummings. He also performed in film scores for Mark Mothersbaugh and in the Frank Zappa alumni band Banned From Utopia.

Miller has released two albums under his own name and two other projects, "The Outsidemen - Band Overboard" and "Two Guys From South Dakota".

Mike Miller was born into a musical family in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on May 8, 1953. He was the third of four bass-playing brothers, performing with his father’s jazz combo at twelve. About the same time he began honing his precocious guitar chops in a series of garage bands, and at fifteen was accepted into the Sioux Falls Symphony as a string bassist.

Miller moved to Colorado in 1972. There he met and played extensively with guitarists Robben Ford, Bill Frisell, and Larry Coryell, and performed in a variety of musical situations, which included opening for the Rolling Stones with ATCO recording artists Sixty Million Buffalo, and playing bass with legendary guitarist Tommy Bolin. While in Colorado, he also hooked up with the Fowler Brothers (Bruce, Tom, Walt, Steve, and Ed of Frank Zappa fame) and came to California to record the album Fly On with the group Air Pocket, produced by jazz great Oliver Nelson. Miller made the move permanent, relocating to Los Angeles in 1975.

In California he began collaborating with Shawn Phillips, Bennie Maupin (fresh from Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters) Max Bennett, Airto Moriera, Tom Scott and the LA Express, Alphonso Johnson (Weather Report), Bobby Caldwell, Brand X, and many others. As Miller grew roots in Los Angeles, he continued developing original music with his contemporaries (such as Billy Childs, Mitchel Forman, Ed Mann, Abe Laboriel, Tom Brechtlein, and David Garfield) at clubs through Los Angeles and Southern California.

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