A native of Washington D.C., Allison Miller began her musical studies at the age of seven and started to play drums when she was ten. Miller concluded her academic studies in the University of West Virginia, where she had the opportunity to attend a specialized course dedicated to the study of percussion styles from all around the world. In 2004, Allison Miller released her first album under her own name (5am Stroll) and, five years later, founded the band Boom Tic Boom, alongside with pianist Myra Melford, bassist Todd Sickafoose and violinist Jenny Scheinman, all of them renowned musicians active in New York’s jazz scene. This group was conceived as a privileged vehicle to the interpretation of the drummer’s compositions, characterized by a melodic complexity influenced by progressive jazz, conjugated with the collective dynamics offered by the ensemble, therefore allowing Miller to explore improvisation and specific musical intentions in order to achieve a singular artistic identity. The consistency of Allison Miller’s body of work, both as composer as well as instrumentalist, is widely acknowledged both inside and outside the jazz circuit: the drummer is often distinguished in specialized jazz publications and is the Jazz Ambassador for the U.S.A. Department of State.

Boom Tic Boom’s debut studio album, released in 2010 and properly entitled Boom Tic Boom, was almost exclusively devoted to Miller’s original compositions. No Morphine, No Lilies (2013), the band’s second album, consisted in a more ambitious effort in terms of arrangements and instrumentation, and was recorded with a larger ensemble featuring, besides its original members, the participation of some remarkable musicians such as trumpeter Steve Bernstein and cellist Erik Friedlander. In 2016, Boom Tic Boom released the work Otis Was a Polar Bear, which will be the main focus of the concert we will present at Guimarães Jazz and where Allison Miller will be accompanied by Myra Melford, bassist Thommy Andersson (replacing the group’s original bassist Todd Sickafoose), violinist Charles Burnham (replacing Jenny Scheinman) and two of its most recent effective band members: cornetist Kirk Knuffke and clarinetist Ben Goldberg. Formed by remarkable instrumentalists, this group will certainly play a vibrant and pulsating music, based simultaneously on Miller’s compositions and on improvisation, a music which defies the limits of the modern conventions about what jazz is or can be within the unstable territory of modernity.