Strutting about in the background like a thief in the night, there’s a bass part that seems to weave its low-toned melody into the fabric of the central harmony of “Heaven” as though the two elements were always meant to be joined together in this song. “Heaven” is definitely one of the finer points in the tracklist of bassist and all-around musical mastermind Robert Miller’s new album Summer of Love, but make no mistakes about it – this song is hardly the lone example of brilliance one can point to when breaking down the record’s best aspects. The basslines are but a calling card here; around them, we find a selection of verses, beats and beautifully melodic trappings as familiar to the jazz audience as they are the seasoned pop fan.
If you were under the impression that Robert Miller’s first LP as a solo artist was going to be a purely string-focused affair, you’d better think again and brace yourself for the multilayered fun that is “Walking in the Corner,” “The Night Was a Mystery” and record-starting “Aches and Pains,” the latter pair serving as two of my favorite fusion songs to debut in 2020. Lyrical enigmas of the best kind give “New Life (Annie’s Song)” and “Bourbon Street” an additional poetic buffering they might not have possessed were they more straightforward in their verses, but as far as surrealism as a general aesthetic is concerned, it remains limited to the construction of the words (and not the actual flow of the music).
I love the charmingly experimental rhythm in the balladic “Now and Always,” swaggering “Another One Like You” and aforementioned “Heaven,” each of which make it relatively impossible for journalists to quickly label Summer of Love with any specific genre over another. For a compositional chameleon like Robert Miller, the jazz school will always be home field, but he and his backing band don’t sound like much of a road team when they’re laying into the poppy melodies of a track like “Another One Like You” or the funk of “You Can’t Tell the Truth.” He’s as versatile a player as I’ve listened to in the last three years, and that’s no small statement to make if you’re as familiar with the state of the international underground as I am.
Fans of Robert Miller old and new alike can’t afford to miss out on what the bass master has constructed in Summer of Love, both because of what it means for his future as a solo artist and for the vicious counterattack it delivers in response to an increasingly boring mainstream sound. Project Grand Slam, Miller’s main squeeze, will never be a pop/rock outfit, but this LP shows us that he can be a pop/rock songwriter when he wants to utilize this type of a platform as a creative outlet. It’s good long-term planning from my viewpoint, and artistically speaking, it’s easy for me to see where someone on this guy’s level would need a channel of this nature in 2020.
Troy Johnston