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What if?

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Joel Miller

Label: Leaf Music Inc.
Released: 2025
Duration: 00:41:00
Views: 45

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I grew up in a musical family. Dad taught formal music composition at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Mom loved jazz and dancing. I had privilege, a loving family, and all the things I needed to fit in, but I struggled in school. I didn’t play sports and felt quite different from most of the other kids in Sackville. All that changed at age 10 when my brother handed me a saxophone. Music saved me.

The act of freely creating and experimenting with sound enabled me to find my voice. Listening to and emulating jazz became my new language, which my mom called “Anglo-Saxophone” at the time. Playing saxophone in jazz and punk bands opened my world and became a way to connect with people. This album’s first track, This and That sees me in the jazz world I came to know as a young adult: a melody and a supporting harmony providing a vehicle for me to improvise.

As I went off to Montreal and to McGill University in 1989 and dedicated my life’s work to jazz and its values of improvisation, exploration, sharing, and from-the-people origins, I had the privilege of being invited to play alongside musicians from cultures very different from my own. Tracks 2, From this Lando and 3, Harvey are influenced by my experiences playing Afro-Latin music, which affected my composing and became part of my signature sound. I was very much my mother’s son.

After becoming a father myself, I began to appreciate more clearly my own father’s classical music world, with its values of formal architecture. Tracks 4, Dew drop in and 5, Nos étoiles depict my willingness to assert my own exploration of wanderlust, whatever it may be.

In 2015, I began a master’s degree at McGill’s Schulich School of Music Jazz Area, but I was seeking something beyond that, and was fortunate to be able to convince classically trained musicians to play in a sort of chamber symphony, which was my master’s project, and which evolved into my Juno-nominated/ECMA-winning album UNSTOPPABLE.

Life had other plans for me. My universe was thrown off course when my mother died in 2017, followed by divorce from my lifelong partner. Then, as I was on the bus heading to the Montreal airport to fly to the Junos in March 2020, I got a call: “Don’t get on the plane—there’s some virus and it looks like things will be cancelled.” We all know what happened next … so many changes, affecting so many people.

This led to my return to New Brunswick, and to seeking new communities to support my music. My first stop was home. Track 6, Debussy’s Claire de Lune was what my dad played to serenade my mom in the 1960s and is, therefore, responsible for my existence. Meanwhile, my career, as I had known it, was falling apart. My daughter, off to the USA to live with her mother, closed a chapter of my life. Track 7, Intervals echoes Gustav Mahler’s deep yearning for another world. It is a retreat inward. And track 8, Wait for it … embodies persistence.

Whenever my dad, soon to be 93, sits at a piano, he starts playing 9, Chopin op. 28 prelude 1. I’ve come to know it as a musical reset button. And a reset is precisely what happened to me in 2022. So many friends gave me a hand. Track 10, What a Wonderful World is my partner Mel, reaching out and introducing me to something I had perhaps always felt but never had the words for. She calls it “the & space.” What if jazz and classical worlds could just be exactly that? This and That, instead of This vs. That. Thus, this album is a hopeful offering. A version of how things can be. What if?

My old assumptions about the piece that inspired track 11, Pachebel’s Canon in D were that it was “boring.” As I dove into arranging it for a concert in a Symphony New Brunswick series in 2025, I realized I could have fun with it in the same way I do with my jazz creations. I ended up completely reworking it to “fold in” an orchestration concept my professor John Rea called “the division of labour.” I took the “boring” ostinato we all recognize from weddings, divided it up into smaller pieces and shared it amongst the entire ensemble. But wait a second: what was happening here? Welcome to the “&” space.

As luck would have it, when I asked my bass-playing brother if he’d be interested in recording an album with his Resonance New Music Ensemble, he replied with a simple “yes.” Track 12, Joé Chevere roughly translates as “Joe Cool” in Spanish. It is dedicated to my Colombian timbalero friend, the late Joé “Armando” Torres, who brought me into his world of Latin music in Montreal.

—Joel Miller

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