Smitty: You know what I’m saying? Because, man, when I first started getting into the concert portion of it.
MM: Yeah.
Smitty: I said to myself, if a person cannot dance at all, he will learn how.
MM: (Laughs.)
Smitty: It was that funky, you know what I mean?
MM: (Laughs.)
Smitty: This DVD will make you busta move at the Library!
MM: Yeah, come on, man. Get your dance on, man. (Laughs) Oh, that’s nice. I put off doing a DVD for a long time just because I wanted to make sure we did it the right way and I’m really happy with the way it came out, and then the songs that we chose, they were just really the songs that we had been doing on tour that whole year. I like to do my original songs. I like to do some songs that you might not expect to hear, like a Miles Davis song from 1959 or something like that. And what else is nice is that Lalah Hathaway came in and did a cameo for me, Raphael Saadiq came in and did a cameo, so it was pretty sweet.
Smitty: Yes, and it was great to see them. And you kinda jumped in there with the vocals, man. (Laughs.)
MM: Oh yeah, I’m not gonna hurt nobody with this, you know?
Smitty: (Laughs.) All right, I gotta ask you this because I’m not sure everybody knows that Marcus Miller plays a mean saxophone.
MM: (Laughs.)
Smitty: Man, talk a little bit about when you first started playing the saxophone.
MM: My first instrument was the clarinet and then I started on saxophone a couple of years after that when I was probably 12, so I actually played those instruments longer than I played the bass. It’s just that I picked up the bass about 13 or 14 years old, I just connected to it and that was that, but I never stopped playing the horns, and when I used to write music for David Sanborn or Grover Washington Jr., I always played the sax on the demos just to mess with them. (Both laugh.) Grover would be like “Now, who’s playing the horn? Tell me that’s not you, please.” (Both laugh.) I said “Yeah, man.” He said “Well, okay, I like the song, I’ll use the song on my album, but you can’t play anymore saxophone.” (Both laugh.) It was always nice to mess with him like that.
Smitty: Yeah, man, that keeps it fresh too, you know?
MM: (Laughs), exactly, exactly.
Smitty: Yeah. Now, on the DVD, you talked about your first bass and you talked about your second bass and your third bass. However, this all happened in a relatively short period of time.
MM: Right. Correct.
Smitty: I love this story, talk a little bit about that and what happened.
MM: Well, I had a couple of beginner basses, but my first real, quality bass was a Fender jazz bass that my mom bought me and it cost $250 out of the case, which was a whole lotta money back in 1975-1976. And I had it for a while and I left it on the side of my car when I was packing my equipment one day and drove off and left it and somebody picked it up and never bothered to return it to me so, as you can imagine, I was pretty upset, told my mom, and she went out and pulled another $250 out and bought me another one and I proceeded to leave that in my car two weeks later and that one was stolen out of the car. So now I’ve lost two basses and I wasn’t really sure whether Mom was gonna give me anymore money to get another one, but she did, and that bass that I have now is the one I’ve been playing for like 30 years and it has such a great sound to it. It’s like I’ve been getting recognized as much for the sound on my bass as much as the notes that I play on it, so I think God had a hand in getting me the right instrument in my hands even though I was a bonehead in the way I went about it. Everything seemed to work out okay for me.
Smitty: Yeah, and I’m sure you would certainly say to everyone that moms are special.
MM: Man, I couldn’t thank her enough and when they (Fender) finally decided to make a Marcus Miller model bass, they based it on that bass that she bought me and she was the first person that I called. I said “You won’t believe this, but this bass that you finally bought me is now the prototype for a whole line of basses that Fender is making,” so she was pretty thrilled to hear that.
Smitty: (Laughs.) That’s cool. I hear a number of jazz bass players saying to me all the time “I’m trying to get the Marcus Miller sound” or “I bought a Fender bass because I love that Marcus Miller sound and I want to make sure that it stays alive and I wanna bring it here and I wanna take it there.”
MM: (Laughs.)
Smitty: So you have a lot of your peers that truly revere what you have done over the years with the great Fender bass.
MM: Yeah, man, it’s an honor that these guys, all over the world feel that way I’ll go into a club after my concert and hear some guy playing my bass and playing my licks. (Laughs.)
Smitty: Isn’t that cool?
MM: At first it tripped me out, but now it’s just really…I’m really honored.
Smitty: Yeah, it’s gratifying.
MM: I saw one guy wearing my hat too.
