Mark Christian Miller’s fourth album brings together a legendary rhythm section with three of the jazz world’s most consistent and gifted artists.
Chris Dawson, piano
Chuck Berghofer, bass
Joe LaBarbera, drums
Robert Kyle, reeds
Josh Nelson, special guest
Mark Christian Miller has recorded his fourth album, “Strange Meadowlark” on the heels of his critically acclaimed 2022 release “Music in the Air.” “Strange Meadow Lark” features a legendary rhythm section made up of Joe La Barbera on drums and Chuck Berghofer on bass. Both have amassed countless credits with some of the leading names in jazz and pop music. The sensitive and swinging Chris Dawson plays piano, and one of music’s most in demand and versatile reed men, Robert Kyle, plays and contributes most of the arrangements. The material is eclectic, featuring composers from Oscar Brown to Henry Mancini. Miller performs a jazz influenced reading of Ned Rorem and Robert Hillyer’s best known art song “Early in the Morning,” arranged by the gifted Josh Nelson who plays on the track. Miller accompanies himself on piano on the record’s final song, “Sometimes,” a tender ballad written by Felice and Henry Mancini, released by the 1970s seminal pop duo The Carpenters.
Liner Notes:
Mark Christian Miller sings with the warmth, sweetness, and genial intimacy of the best friend you wish you had. He phrases a song as if it were conversation, adding a breezy jazz pulse that makes his delivery float on air. His bandmembers take their cue from him and play the words as much as the music.
It’s no wonder that Mark has been a welcome presence on the West Coast jazz scene since the ‘90s, and that so many fine musicians respect him. Joe LaBarbera was Bill Evans’s last steady drummer; Chuck Berghofer has done more top-rank jazz dates and studio sessions than perhaps any bassist in California. Robert Kyle’s saxophone and flute make pop, jazz, Brazilian, and Latin music sound more soulful. And Chris Dawson, the pianist and arranger on most of this album, draws upon a deep knowledge of traditional jazz and bop as well as an obvious affinity for singers.
Mark reached far and wide in gathering the songs. From Oscar Brown, Jr., a singer-songwriter with a profoundly witty and ironic view of civil rights and the human experience, comes “Mr. Kicks,” written for Kicks & Co., a 1961 musical that lasted for four performances on Broadway. The title character is a Mephistophelian hipster who buys a man’s soul; Mark’s nonchalant, swinging ease makes him the most likable of devils.
The first six notes of Dave Brubeck’s “Strange Meadow Lark” are the bird’s actual call; from there the song flies a capricious path of shifting phrase lengths and meters. Mark combines it with “Skylark,”creating a portrait of boyish optimism in the face of uncertainty. He brings that eternal youthfulness to “Hello Love,” a late-‘50s cabaret obscurity about greeting a new love with defenses down and a heart full of hope.
Mark can personalize even the most familiar chestnuts in the Great American Songbook. His rendition of “Dream” is as languid as a summer night. On “You Make Me Feel So Young,” Kyle, on flute, becomes his hop-skipping partner. Mark savors all the whimsical wintertime references in “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm”—a performance heated up by Dawson’s stride-piano intro—and hits the accelerator pedal in “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” written as a mellow fox trot in 1924.
He brings us one of the only nonclassical versions of “Early in the Morning,” Ned Rorem’s 1953 setting of an autobiographical poem by Robert Hillyer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet. Here the arranging and piano are by Josh Nelson, who perhaps for the first time gives Rorem’s music a jazz exploration.
On the closing track Mark accompanies himself on piano. The song, “Sometimes,” was born in the Christmas season of 1970, when Felice Mancini, the daughter of Henry Mancini and his wife Ginny, gifted her parents with a message of gratitude, written in free verse. Henry set the poem to music, and the Carpenters introduced “Sometimes” in 1971. Its tenderness and humility make it a perfect fit for Mark, who couldn’t utter a dishonest phrase if he tried.
—James Gavin, New York City, 2025
[James Gavin’s books include biographies of Chet Baker, Peggy Lee, and Lena Horne.]
Track listing, time, composer/lyricist, publishing, arranger credit:
Mr. Kicks – 4:30
Oscar Brown, Jr.
Cmg Worldwide Inc.
Arr. Robert Kyle
You Make Me Feel So Young – 4:14
Mack Gordon, Josef Myrow
WB Music Corp.
Arr. Robert Kyle
Strange Meadowlark/Skylark – 5:41
Dave Brubeck, Iola Brubeck/Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael
Derry Music Co/WB Music Corp.
Arr. Chris Dawson, Mark Christian Miller
Hello Love – 4:28
Michael Barr, Dion McGregor
Dion McGregor, Michael Preston Barr
Arr. Chris Dawson, Mark Christian Miller
Dream – 6:35
Johnny Mercer
WB Music Corp.
I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm – 3:38
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin Music Company
Early in the Morning – 5:13
Ned Rorem, Robert Hillyer
CF Peters Corporation
Arr. Josh Nelson
I’ll See You In My Dreams – 3:36
Isham Jones, Gus Kahn
Public Domain
Sometimes – 2:07
Henry Mancini, Felice Mancini
Spirit Two Music
Arr. Josh Nelson, Mark Christian Miller
Mark Christian Miller, piano
Credits:
Mark Christian Miller, vocals
Chris Dawson, piano
Joe La Barbera, drums
Chuck Berghofer, bass
Josh Nelson, piano
Mark Christian Miller, piano
Executive Producer, Alan Eichler
Recorded, mixed, mastered by Paul Tavener, Big City Recording
Cover artwork: Mark Christian