Cookout Below: Harry Miller 85

Harry Miller Quintet - Orange Groove

We'll rejoinder yesterday's 1941 with another, because we're dropping more bombs than WWII in here.

There's almost no pictures of him online -- and exactly zero ones in color -- but today would have been the 85th birthday of South African bassist Harry Miller, who supplied the percolating bottom to so many favorite LPs of mine.

He was essentially the house bass player for the ridiculously awesome record label Ogun, for which you've heard me sing mad praises as recently as Louis Moholo's birthday a few weeks ago.

His much-celebrated, moodsetting cameo -- featuring a bowed double bass -- opens the 1971 King Crimson LP Islands, which is where most people who don't know who he was would have heard him.

One of the stalwarts of 1970s British Jazz, he's on recordings by almost all of its pivotal figures like Mike Westbrook -- who just passed a couple of weeks ago, in fact -- and John Surman, among many.

He also led his own groups and made his own records, before moving to The Netherlands at the end of the 1970s. He unfortunately died very young, at 42 in a car accident there in 1983.

To celebrate his milestone b'day-in-absentia, let's toast Bottoms Up! for this titan of the low end with two killer BBC sessions from the mid Seventies. These circulate fairly commonly, but I removed the unctuous announcer and brightened them up a little bit.

 Harry Miller

BBC sessions

1976-77

01 Family Affair

02 Where Now Then?

Harry Miller's Isipingo

BBC Studios, London UK; likely January 1976

Harry Miller - bass

Marc Charig - trumpet & cornet

Keith Tippett - piano

Malcolm Griffiths - trombone

Mike Osborne - alto saxophone

Louis Moholo - drums

03 Orange Grove

04 A Traumatic Experience

Harry Miller Quintet

BBC Studios, London UK 12.18.1977

Harry Miller - bass

Bernie Holland - guitar

Trevor Watts - alto & soprano saxophones

Alan Wakeman - tenor & soprano saxophones

Louis Moholo - drums

Total time: 46:30

master off-air FM reel captures of two original BBC broadcasts

remastered by EN, April 2026
316 MB FLAC/direct link

I've got one more lethal blast of birthday blissness slated for Tuesday before we haste away to the Maypole, but I wanted to tribute Harry Miller -- born this day in 1941 -- and there aren't that many more ROIOs of him than there are suitable photographs!-J.

4.25.1941 - 12.16.1983