The Miller Brothers

The Miller Brothers are Harry, Latu and Maua. During their primary school years their father taught them the ukulele first, then guitar, all by ear. About singing, he used to say “If you can talk, you can sing.” He was such a stickler for timing. He often barked “Don’t stop to correct anything. Just stay in tempo and get it right the next time around!”.

Perhaps the most important advice their father gave them was to “play with feeling”. Latu recalls being yelled at one time for just mechanically strumming the chords. That was never to happen again! “Jazz is a feeling” he said, “not just a bunch of chords!”. The boys developed good ears for chords and were able to learn the tunes through listening. On jazz improvisation their father explained it as “thinking of the melody line while playing another”. He was quite the task master and it was hard going at the start.

However, it became easier over time through practice in addition to regular public appearances where one simply had to obey the unwritten rule of “live” performance. You just did it, hoping for the least number of blue notes, either vocally or instrumentally, or both. The brothers grew up to truly appreciate what their father was saying. It certainly put them on a good musical footing for life. Their father led his family band for many years before deciding to let the boys continue while he managed the Moonglow and Le Tanoa nightclubs.

Their father would then occasionally join them for the odd jam session or gig. The Miller Band, as it was called then, continued after their father retired, until it disbanded in the early ‘80s. During their playing years the boys were often asked about writing their own songs and recording them. The notion seemed ridiculous and irrelevant at the time, and it never happened. It was not until the Willie Miller CD was finally completed in 2012 that Latu began to gain some confidence in producing music CDs “do-it-yourself” style, using recovered audio. So then, “Why not do a Miller brothers CD using the remainder of the old stuff that has the three of us playing?”.

The result was the first Miller Brothers CD, which was simply called Play. Like the Willie Miller CD, Play is a rearrangement of numbers recovered from old cassette tapes and the stereo CD from the 2005 attempt. But unlike the Willie Miller CD the opportunity arose to include one or two numbers from later jam sessions, a luxury the brothers did not have with their father’s CD. The first track on Play is a cover of Black Sand, a composition by Hawaiian jazz-rock group Kalapana, from 1978, during the Moonglow days. The band line-up then was Harry and Latu on guitars, Maua on keyboard, Billy Fuiono Fa’ai’uaso on bass, and Richard “Pisi” Stanley on drums.

As Time Goes By is a studio jam session captured during the making of a friend’s CD in 1997 at Montage Studio, Auckland. You can hear Maua emulating Dad’s tenor sax on keyboards! Their covers of the jazz standards Caravan, Night and Day, Poinciana, Moonglow, and How High The Moon came from the abandoned 2005 guide tracks that were meant for the Willie Miller CD. They cleaned them up a little and added some drums, keyboards, and strings. They are performed in the “Dad” chord progressions and feel.

Their version of Samba de Orpheu is typical of how the boys bonded throughout their lives, sitting around with guitar in hand where possible, and jamming away on anything and everything. This track was captured directly into a laptop in Latu’s garage in Auckland 2007. It is a raw guitar trio jam session with no added embellishments. Harry leads off the melody on a Gibson SG on left pan, Latu on an Ibanez GB10 with bass/rhythm in centre pan, and Maua filling in on a nylon acoustic on right pan. Maua then takes first solo, followed by Latu soloing on right pan while Maua plays bass on nylon acoustic in centre pan, and finally Harry leads out.

Leimomi is a Hawaiian tune extracted from a video  capture of the 2011 fundraising charity concert at the Orator Hotel in Apia, September 2011 for the Mapu-I-Fagalele rest home. The line-up for the gig was Harry and Latu on guitars, Maua on keys and bass, Frank Elia on drums, and friends Mac Laban, Oliva Va’ai, and Deacon Eves taking turns on bass. The last track on Play is an instrumental arrangement of Billie Nelson’s It Is Only A Memory. Their father was supposed to have recorded lead vocals at the abandoned 2005 attempt.

As far as the boys know this is the first time the Introduction or Verse of It Is Only A Memory has been voiced or recorded, thanks to a torn and tattered copy of the original manuscript which they found when clearing Dad’s “shed”. That melody part is played by Maua on piano. Like the Willie Miller CD the feel of Play is one of a casual live improvisation session rather than a planned CD project in the making. The brothers feel eternally grateful to their father for his gift of music. While he was certainly a pioneer of Jazz in Samoa, Dad could conceivably be the first Samoan ever, to not only have introduced Jazz to Samoa, but to also continue practising this art form to the end.

Looking at Dad objectively and not through the eyes of a son, Latu sees Willie Miller as a very gifted virtuoso with incredible musical talent. He was a multi-instrumentalist with a unique sense of harmony and timing, and a proponent of the trickiest genre in the musical art form. And all of this was learned through determination and intuition. Such is the legacy of Jazz left to the brothers by their father Tuiafelolo Maiava Willie Miller.

 

Click on the YouTube links below to watch, hear, or download the tracks from the CD Play.

1. Black Sand (Kalapana)
2. As Time Goes By (Herman Hupfeld)
3. Poinciana (Buddy Bernier & Nat Simon)
4. Samba De Orpheu (Luiz Bonfa)
5. Moonglow (Will Hudson & Irving Mills)
6. So Danco Samba (Antonio Carlos Jobim)
7. Night & Day (Cole Porter)
8. Caravan (Juan Tizol)
9. Lei Momi (Hawaiian traditional standard)
10. How High The Moon (Nancy Hamilton & Morgan Lewis)
11. It Is Only A Memory (Billie Nelson)