Born on June 14, 1959, in Brooklyn, New York to a musical family, the Grammy Award-winning songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Miller was destined for a life in music. As a teenager he was classically trained on the clarinet but also had a grounding in keyboards, saxophone, and guitar, all of which served him well in his later career. He rose to prominence as a session musician in New York and played on around 500 albums recorded by some of the biggest names in the music business. At the height of his career as a session musician, artists such as Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Mariah Carey, Elton John, Joe Walsh, and Grover Washington Jr. all availed themselves of Marcus Miller's prodigious talent, primarily for his skill on the bass guitar. As a composer he has co-written material with Miles Davis, David Sandborn, and Luther Vandross and through his session work and songwriting, he has rarely been out of the charts. Marcus Miller has also enjoyed a successful solo career in parallel with his work for other artists and to date has recorded more than 20 studio albums in his own name including Suddenly (1983), The Sun Don’t Lie (1993), Silver Rain (2005), Marcus (2008), and the number 1 contemporary jazz albums M2 (2001), Renaissance (2012), Afrodeezia (2015), and Laid Black (2018). Marcus Miller has also worked on many film scores including About Last Night (2014), Marshall (2017), Safety (2020), Sidney (2022), and Candy Cane Lane (2023).
