THE HYBRID-PICKING MOLLY MILLER AIMS TO “BRING BACK THE INSTRUMENTAL”
By Jim Beaugez
PLENTY OF CONVENTIONAL instrumental guitar music is geared toward expressing a sort of athleticism with the instrument. California native Molly Miller has the chops for all that and more, but she takes a straighter path to musical enlightenment — one steeped in creative phrasing and genre-blending, like the music she plays in the Molly Miller Trio.
“Instrumental tunes that stand on their own as songs but also have the element of improvisation and arranging ring true to me,” Miller says. “[We] think of things like Booker T., early R&B tunes, surf tunes — the tagline we say sometimes is, ‘bringing back the instrumental.’”
On the Molly Miller Trio’s recent long player St. George, the bandleader performs gently emotive, jazz-adjacent music with bassist Jennifer Condos, who previously backed Stevie Nicks and Ray LaMontagne, and drummer Jay Bellerose, who also performs with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. But the music Miller composes has less in common with be-bop than the funk, soul and folk she also cites as influences.
“I very much think of myself as a guitar player,” she says. “I don’t think of myself as a jazz guitarist, per se; more just like a guitarist-musician. I have an eclectic taste in music and I think all of that led me to wanting to create music that resonated with people as songs.”
Miller has built her life around her love of the guitar, recording and touring with artists such as Jason Mraz and the Black Eyed Peas while chairing the guitar department at Los Angeles College of Music since 2016. Her life has revolved around the instrument for far longer, though.
From ages 7 to 14, she played top 40 music and classics by the Beatles and the Beach Boys in a cover band with her siblings, while moonlighting with friends on blink-182 songs and also playing in a jazz band. Despite spending so much time centered around music, though, she wasn’t very serious about her talent at first.
“Before high school, I was notoriously the worst disciplined of the family band,” she admits. “I was always trying to get out of band practice and hang out with my friends, extend our bathroom breaks, [making] every excuse. I never practiced. And then I got into high school and I was like, ‘Well, I actually love this.’”
Miller, who furthered her music studies at Berklee College of Music camps and earned a doctorate in musical arts from the University of Southern California, has a tendency to play behind the beat in a subtle way, hanging her notes ri
