Imagine…Bach on the banjo.
This is where Baroque meets the jukebox blues.
In this room Stevie Wonder and J.S. Bach sip espresso and talk harmony next to the table where Carole King and Stephen Sondheim talk of rhyme. This is the room where anything can happen.
Imagine the composer/musician Michael J. Miles—the fifth of five— growing up in a Chicago house where Irish harmonies meet political poetry and the player-piano pumps ragtime into the night. So grows the inner jukebox that now hums with 500 years of pop songs: Curtis Mayfield, Dave Brubeck, Pete Seeger, Stevie Wonder, J.S. Bach. These songs become set lists and the conversations become storylines.
This true north is where American Bach spins with the Great American Jukebox—a living anthology of popular sound reimagined for fingerstyle guitar and clawhammer banjo. And on some good days, the cello is in town.
And there is Michael J. Miles. Musical hunter-gatherer. Electrifying performer. Boundless bender of genres. You simply have to hear him play.
American Bach
From Senegal to Seeger
Solo Acoustic
“This is one of the most beautiful recordings I’ve heard in all my 70 years... It is enough to make me want to learn the banjo all over again.”
Dates
“Genius...in a musician’s paradise, the viral videos would be artists like Michael J. Miles playing his banjo.”