Lloyd Miller died early in the morning on December 27th, 2024. He was 86 years old. While the cause of his death was undisclosed, his wife Katherine Saint John said he had recently suffered a stroke; Miller had been in failing health for some time. Now-Again’s Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, who worked with Miller to manage and promote his catalog of inventive and esoteric jazz, wrote this short obituary.
I called him maestro as that’s what he was, of so many disciplines and challenges and dogmas. Those who might feel compelled to read further here will probably do so because of the wonderful clutch of records Lloyd cut and issued, both in Paris and in America, which culminated in his self-released masterpiece Oriental Jazz. Those who read further must also be asked to forgive the personal nature of these words, as Lloyd was a close friend and musical collaborator, and in the same way I couldn’t write about the passing of Galt MacDermot or David Axelrod outside of the personal, I couldn’t do so here.
My life working in music has topped more than a quarter century. Lloyd’s life in music spanned nearly 75 years. We first met when he drove from Salt Lake City to LA to hand deliver me his discography on vinyl, including an acetate he had cut of his solo piano experiments with Jef Gilson in Paris in the early 60s. He never told me why he took that long drive, nearly twenty years ago, but we hit it off immediately. And that evening’s hang led to one of the more challenging relationships I’ve developed with a musical elder. I’m much the better for it.
Lloyd Miller, circa 1949, at home in Glendale, California.
Lloyd was born in the Rossmoyne neighborhood in Glendale. “We used to look down on LA,” he was fond of saying which, for those on Glendale’s peaks, can be quite the view. “I remember dropping by your place in Eagle Rock, a town familiar to me from my days at Flintridge Prep when I used to sneak out of the dorm late at night to walk down through Eagle Rock on my way to the Beverly Cavern to see Kid Ory or George Lewis play” Lloyd wrote me later. That would have been in the early 1950s, around the time that Richard Neutra was building the Eagle Rock Recreation Center and well before the 134 Freeway was carved into the hills behind it. Even if fourteen year old Lloyd had caught a bus by the time he got to Eagle Rock Boulevard, that was still one helluva scary walk through, basically, wilderness. That was Lloyd’s fervor for jazz.
This was also the decade that his parents sent him to various hospitals where he suffered multiple bouts of electroshock therapy. His folks just didn’t know what to do with him, this child of theirs who didn’t fit into any box they hoped he would. Lloyd spun many tales, and many of them were outlandish, but of his escape from a Midwestern asylum, where he was one moment shy of a lobotomy, of that Katherine Saint John, his wife and collaborator – a true believer if there ever was one – well, of that experience she says she’s seen printed proof.
Lloyd Miller spoke about a dozen languages, and could play any instrument put in front of him, including those he had never touched before. It was like that since he was a child, he told me. I asked him once if he thought he might be autistic. “I’ve always known I’m ar-tistic,” he replied, laughing, as he drew out the first syllable with an elongated, Southern sigh. “Probably,” he concurred. By his assessment, those early “treatments” his parents sent him to rendered him unable to do much other than what he always knew he would do, anyway: seek music, in its purest forms, learn from those better than him, and create that which had yet to be created.
Lloyd had been homeless more than once. On purpose, mind you – living out of his car so he could be the itinerant musician. He told me he moved to Iran partially because it was warm there, and it made automobile housing a bit more comfortable (Lloyd’s dad’s gig with the Shah had a lot to do with his move too; he also said he was told by a Mormon Bishop that he would find his calling in music there.) Lloyd recorded music with Jef Gilson and Henri Texier in Paris in the early 1960s, all that came out contemporaneously was the excellent 10” Jef Gilson Septet Avec Lloyd Miller in 1961. He played with Tony Scott and Romano Mussolini and many others. He founded his own East West Records while teaching at the University of Utah and put out all of his classic records before he moved to Iran, became Kurosh Ali Khan, and hosted a prime time television show up until the Revolution. Why and how he left Iran was subject to Lloyd’s sometimes fantastical retelling of the moments, but I recall him telling of visions of blood in the streets and the terror and helplessness he felt fleeing the one place he had felt accepted, comfortable, at home in his life.
By the early 1980s, Lloyd Miller was convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated arson and conspiracy to commit insurance fraud around he and his then-wife’s Khyber Kitchen restaurant and his New Eastern Third World Gifts music shop in Salt Lake City. This, mind you, was after Lloyd had returned to Utah from spending seven years in Iran, speaking Farsi, Iraqi and Arabic, and trying to establish something of a mini-bazaar in the Mormon Capital. If you weren’t around in the early 1980s, you might forget just how much many Americans despised Iranians. Middle Eastern folks in general. The plot involved an FBI informant and – I quote from the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Lloyd’s conviction here – “a bizarre scheme (that) was discussed to steal red-eye missiles from a military base and fly them in a World War II bomber to fighters resisting the Russians in Afghanistan.”
More from the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling:
“At trial, Miller’s defense attorney offered the testimony of Dr. Madsen, a psychiatrist qualified as an expert witness. Dr. Madsen had examined Miller nine times in the course of counseling and psychotherapy after the incidents surrounding the charged conspiracy… He would have testified that Miller had a history of psychiatric care since childhood and that, although Miller was aware of the nature and consequences of his actions, he was a “Walter Mitty” type, possessed of a vivid imagination and often reckless in his talk without having any intention of carrying out his schemes. Dr. Madsen would also have testified that in his opinion the incident for which Miller was on trial had “the same quality and character” as other harmless incidents in Miller’s past, and it demonstrated the workings of an active imagination rather than the intent to carry out an act.”
There’s a film about all this, based on Lloyd’s semi-fictional memoir, both of the same title: The Sufi, The Saint, and The Swinger. If you’re intrigued, you’ll do far better to watch – or read – it than imagine what transpired here.
Lloyd Miller and Katherine Saint John’s living room in their modest house in a Salt Lake City suburb is a marvel, and is adorned by what Lloyd called “a lifetime in Oriental Jazz” the title of that best known Miller album, the articulation of a study of one of America’s greatest artforms and the music of the East, all executed in this city, of all places. There are hand woven rugs and blankets, an old wood burning stove, an alcove adorned with instruments from Iran and Afghanistan, photos of Lloyd from 50 years ago, proclamations from the then Shah of Iran, and photos of Lloyd and his family with the Shah’s. Like I wrote previously, Lloyd’s stories were outlandish but most times, when looking for proof of a happening, Lloyd had it. I hope Katherine maintains it as it is; I’m sure she will.
In 2010 when my hip and curious friend, the French fashion designer Christophe Lemaire, wanted to include Lloyd’s “Gol-e Gandom” on a compilation he was assembling for issue on Now-Again, Lloyd denied the use in such a brutal take down of modern music that Jeff Jank posted the exchange on Stones Throw’s website. Rap message board fans laughed at this geezer and his diatribes. But I sent Lloyd the link and I think it made him happy; his words, out there, unfiltered, somehow reaching people, perhaps causing them to rethink their choices in music. He denied a sample Theo Parrish wanted to clear for release, and, as always, he did so in a way that showed his uncompromising approach to music, and what made him all but an exile throughout most of his career.
If you’re wondering, he didn’t spare me, though he always found a way to lead with the carrot after using the stick. “Thanks for the update,” he once wrote, as I excused my late reply because I was playing records in clubs in Europe. “So you are one of those DJs I resent for replacing all us starving failed has-been jazzmen. But if you are DJ-ing like you said, you must be awesome. And yes maybe we can change the world for the better now that every type of loud, ugly noisy techno-traumatic terror has been unleashed on and totally inundated the whole world for over 50 miserable years. They have made it a horrible musical slum and thus have created a dire need for someone to drain the swamp and you are part of that team eventually working for a beautiful future. So I will package up the ‘Oriental Jazz’ LP for you soon and in a separate package I will send you my two hard cover ethnomusicology/philosophy books.”
Above, Katherine Saint John and her late husband Lloyd Miller.
Lloyd Miller once wrote me:
“I figure that the ugly stuff will soon just burn itself out without anyone lighting a match to it. I just will not be part of any of it.
My whole life has been to promote music that I feel is beautiful but not fake and syrupy, energetic but not thumping, phony and electronically loud and music with a spiritually-oriented and moral message like old New Orleans spirituals. So my purpose in music is to share a message of a better way of life like Horace Silver’s energetic tune “The Preacher.” That is what I am, a musical preacher, not just with words but mostly with sound.
Katherine has convinced me to just play great music and keep any angry politically incorrect critiques of other styles and artists to myself. But it has been difficult to have been silenced by the rock conspiracy and to sit by and be black-balled and boycotted by the music industry which is now apparently under the total control of the masters of hell.”
Lloyd was one for religious bombast, and he studied all religions, but he especially was fond of early Christianity and Islam. On a visit to his home with Madlib Lloyd, upon our request, read us sections of Quran in Arabic, from a worn paperback copy he’d carried with him for years. He apologized, as his Arabic was rusty, he said, but he made his way through the text, translating as he went, and explaining the grammar that comprised the sentences.
Before that meeting in Salt Lake City, Lloyd Miller had written me:
“I am looking forward to a serious face to face about our goals, together and individually so we can find all the common ground and mutual understanding possible since you are my main contact with the outside world. I don’t do anything for money but am happy to get funds as much as fair to accumulate in order to be able to further my agenda of saturating the market with really beautiful music to balance the overly prevalence of darkness and violence. We need that too, but not only that.
I think you know where I am coming from even if you don’t mostly agree; but that’s fine. It would take an miracle for my concept of great music to be accepted by more than and a handful of people now that they have been body and brain-snatched by the rock and pop tyrants. So any project that is wholesome, praiseworthy and in sync with Islamic and old time Christian values is something I will be very happy to collaborate with.”
Under all that bluster, Lloyd was actually quite curious about modern music, and of those that make it, even if he didn’t like like it. He recorded a wonderful album with The Heliocentrics, and even gave Malcolm Catto and Jake Ferguson a chance to tongue in cheek poke fun at him with “Lloyd’s Diatribe.” He knew that I produced and issued albums full of music that he said followed the tidings of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – his preferred term for The Beatles. He asked many questions to Madlib and myself about the work we were doing with the rapper Logic on that visit to Salt Lake City, and, upon hearing them, related stories of the way he worked with Jef Gilson in Paris in the early 1960s. He suggested that, in his estimation, Logic was to Gilson what Madlib was to himself. Madlib told Lloyd about the odd ways that he plays instruments, and Lloyd was not put off – Madlib could play anything he wanted, and it would be cool. Lloyd talked about loping rhythms, and how the Indians could turn around time signatures that would make most musicans stumble. Katherine talked about finding the rhythms that drove Bulgarian folk dancers. Lloyd would infrequently share your opinions on anything outside of jazz – and you might not even share opinions there, if you weren’t into Dixieland’s staying power (I’m not) or if you thought that the Jef Gilson and Hal Singer album was worth a listen (I do) – but he would never make you feel less-than.
The last time I visited Lloyd and Katherine was on a follow up visit to work with Logic. Madlib cancelled – he had a bad cough. I relayed the news to Lloyd, who had asked where Madlib was, as I sat with Katherine and Lloyd and a cool fella who I can only refer to as Logic’s armorer. “He cancelled working on music because of a cough,” Lloyd laughed. “ A cough can be rhythmic! That could have been great!”
I knew Lloyd Miller through many stages of my life – getting married; the sustained, angry dissolution of one big musical partnership; bringing kids in the world;, building new musical partnerships; getting divorced; the sustained, angry dissolution of another big musical partnership. We wouldn’t talk all of the time, but we emailed often. I was surprised, when I looked back at our exchanges, how candid I had been with Lloyd, and how empathetic and supportive he had been to me. This is the type of messages Lloyd would send me:
“Dude,
Great to hear from you. I worry about you because you are my only music relative and only soul son right now. Remember any problems we have in life are for our education because it is all just a big, often bad, high school full of bullies and sneaks as well as just a few solid supportive friends.
Keep happy and keep in touch bro,
Lloyd”
I must add here that Lloyd Miler didn’t hate. Lloyd didn’t despise. Or, perhaps, he had learned his way not to. I think, like all of us, that Lloyd had complicated and difficult relationships – he probably had more than most – and I think that a fair amount of pain must have always followed those that were close to him. He piled and plied and stretched and returned to various philosophical and religious dogmas in ways that were nearly impossible to keep up with, let alone reason through. But there’s one thing I can say definitively. I’ve met many musicians who say they do it all for the music, and that everything else is secondary, and most of them are liars. For Lloyd Miller, it was the truth.
We worked together in reality, Lloyd Miller and me, and he was fastidious about contracts and accounting obligations and proper annotation on records, and things like that. He was inspired when the music supervisor Maggie Phillips pitched one of his Oriental Jazz songs to the show runner of Fargo and it placed. He was overjoyed when another friend, the director Jason Reitman, decided to fly him out to LA, reserve Capitol’s Studio B and put Al Schmitt himself behind the board, to record him playing modal jazz, solo, on a grand piano for consideration in Jason’s movie The Front Runner. It was all about his mission.
In one of our last exchanges, Lloyd Miller wrote me:
“I am serious about the impending classic jazz revival because the world is ripe for destruction but I feel and hope that God will allow one last effort to seek out a handful of good souls to gather together one last time sharing light, love, beauty in the arts before it all blows up to make room for the 1,000 years of heavenly earth-life which all religions have promised.
Like a diamond laying in the gutter or a block of gold in a trash can at a rest stop on an abandoned desert road, authentic jazz will be rediscovered and hailed as the one treasure the America has invented along with the ugliness of the military-industrial complex which we merely inherited from the old ‘conquer, steal and enslave’ pattern from the days of wicked Nimrod to the present.
Let others do the dirty work of our old friend the Devil while a handful of us dare to not follow the crowd.”
