Mark Arthur Miller hits the stage at The Green Room 42 with sensational exuberance and sizzling delight. He is in his element as a dancer, singer, and showman. His show, appropriately named, “Soul Searching” dips deep into your heart and soul with some of the best music ever created. Music and lyrics that are moving, beautiful, perceptive, and aesthetic, that you’ll want each song to be pushed past its end and continue on and on. You’ll want the evening to never end. Your soul has been lifted. Lifted to the glowing moon, lifted to the flickering stars.
Motown is in Miller’s blood, literally. His father, Ron Miller, was, in the ’60s, and ’70s, the only white man writing some of the most iconic songs of the era for Motown Records. Mark did not live with his father during this time of their lives. His dad had left the family to pursue the dream of music.
Talent is a gift. A gift that some artists have to grapple with, fully abandoning everything and everyone for it. Art is beauty and truth and spiritual honesty AND exacts its price, demands a toll for the choosing.
Mark Arthur Miller, a jiving, popping, soul singer and performer, as a child lost his father to art, but being so young, he had at first no idea. Through the most unbelievable of circumstances, he discovered that his father had moved to Detroit to become one of Motown’s most prolific and amazing songwriters. Writing such iconic songs as “Touch Me In The Morning,” made famous by Diana Ross, “A Place In The Sun,” “Yester-Me, Yester-You Yesterday,” “For Once In My Life,” all recorded by Stevie Wonder, to name but a few.
While his dad was in Detroit making history, Mark’s mom had moved Mark and his sister and grandparents to the Southside of Chicago where they were the only white family in the neighborhood. Mark hung out with the local kids and listened to their radio Station WVON, “Only one radio station has chronicled the rich history of the Black Experience in Chicago. WVON. The Voice of the Negro made its debut in April 1963.” With friends and that radio station, Mark became a master in the music of Motown. He formed with four of his friends, his black friends, a band they named “Integration.” Their band performed novelty songs like “My Ding-a-Ling” and “Hot Nuts.” While living in the Southside, Mark heard for the first time Otis Redding. He was starting to understand the arrangement of song and sound. Combining jazz and cabaret, cresting together beautiful sounds of great depth. Learning how to create smooth, cool, and timeless.
Mark has said of his childhood, “Every day I think I would wake with the feelings of loss and gain, of hope and fear, of love and abandonment, and of art, music, and dreams coming true. I think this as if it was me. I would feel these opposing emotions in my life. My life as a son and an artist.” He has found not only solace in those emotions but depth to sing them and to bring them to us with love and light.
Mark and his marvelous band, a band that could have backed up any of the greats who originated these musical legends, rock the stage at The Green Room with Motown sound and Motown moves and voices that skyrocket us to the human equation of stellar beauty and sound.
Nature or nurture. Mark seems to have gotten both in spades and shares them with not only the fans from then but the fans from now, as this music is timeless. He’s a magician of music sharing the memories of Motown.
The amazing band backing Mark includes his co-producer and co-arranger, keyboard player/vocalist, and recording artist, Peter Smith. Arrangements of songs including two written by Mark 87th & King and I Don’t Have The Time. His band, Robin Macatangay on guitar, Vashon Johnson on bass, Duane Eubanks on trumpet, Stacy Dillard on tenor sax, Greg Gonzales on drums, and the amazing vocals of Lauren Scales and Elsa Cornish.
“The Green Room 42 570 Tenth Avenue
