Western Centuries; Jim Miller at left.
As a veteran musician in a young band, Jim Miller knows what it’s like when things come full circle, yet are new at the same time. So it will be when his current band, Western Centuries, arrives at Cafe Nine on Friday to play in the town that helped turn him on to the music he loved decades ago.
“My dad was an academic so we traveled around a lot,” Miller said. His father was Richard S. Miller, an ecologist, and “at the time ecology was just sort of forming as a field of study. Me and my brother were handed butterfly nets when we were four.”
“I also started playing guitar at the same damn time,” he added.
During Miller’s childhood his family moved from Cambridge, Mass. to Fort Collins, Co., to Saskatoon in Canada, and then finally to Branford, when his father landed a job at the Yale School of Forestry.
It was 1967, and Miller was 13. That meant he was there to see the Jimi Hendrix Experience play Woolsey Hall in November 1968. Miller was a sophomore in high school and already a “young fanatic” for music.
“I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix,” Miller said. “Hippies were looking at us like, ‘Why are these children here?’”
The unexpected result of that Hendrix show was seeing opening band Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys, which featured acclaimed musician Jay Ungar on fiddle. “I had never seen music like this,” Miller said, “and I thought, ‘Wow! Fiddles in a rock band.’” That same year, his brother bought him a banjo, “and I just started playing it. And that’s what led me down the garden path and I was just lost.”
He discovered a spot called The Enormous Room on Yale’s campus and started showing up.
“It was a tiny room,” he said, “and they would have the best freaking bluegrass possible. I saw Ralph Stanley 10 times there. The other guy who would play there was Joe Val. And we were all rock ‘n’ roll and whatever — I liked The Band and liked more earthy rock ‘n’ roll — but when that got on our radar, we said, ‘this is what we got to do.’” (He ended up playing fiddle for 12 years as well. “It took me a long time to figure out that I sucked at fiddle,” Miller said, laughing. He finally dropped it at a party — as in, literally dropped and broke the instrument — and realized it was probably for the best.)
Miller also got a front-row seat to the Black Panther trial in 1970. “I saw Huey Newton lecture in Woolsey Hall,” Miller said, and “we would have Black Panthers staying out our house” during the Bobby Seale trial. “Super-liberal Yale people were just low-hanging fruit for them.” The New Haven trial spilled over into Branford in another way as well: “I’m in Branford High School and we look out the window, and tanks are rolling by on the street,” Miller said. “They kept tanks at the Branford Armory during the trial. They were poised. We were in class and looking out the window and thinking, ‘that’s weird.’”
He graduated high school in 1971 and went to Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. He got into lepidopterology and got his Ph.D. from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. As he had in New Haven, he also fell into Ithaca’s music scene — specifically its own approach to playing Appalachian fiddle music.
That made him a founding and long-time member of Donna the Buffalo, which is headlining the CT Folk Festival in September. The band’s first gig was in 1987 in Ithaca “and it was so super-rough,” Miller said. “I don’t think we thought too much about it. But then we started getting calls from other places, and we started touring.”
Meanwhile, however, Miller was also pursuing his career as an entomologist. “I did the entomology stuff full-on,” he said. From Cornell he did a fellowship at the Smithsonian, and in time landed a job at the Museum of Natural History in New York, as an associate curator.
“You get that job if you’re lucky and they take you out in a stretcher,” Miller said.
But he left it. “I’m holding that job down, which is kind of high-profile — I’m supposed to be in the New York Times every day! — and meanwhile I’m loving the music.” Donna the Buffalo’s touring schedule was getting more rigorous. The band was booking bigger and bigger gigs. “It was too many full-time jobs,” he said. So in 1999 he made a decision: “I’m going to try it — I’m going to try to make music for a living,” he said.
He toured with Donna the Buffalo full-time from then until 2005; in addition to loving the music, he was married to Tara Nevins, one of the leaders of the band. “I always played my heart out when I played with them,” Miller said. “I was always the backup guy,” he said, primarily playing rhythm guitar and singing. “I was good at it and I liked it.”
But in 2005, “it was time to go.” He and Nevins divorced. The split with the band was musical as well. Eventually, Miller said, “I didn’t believe in it.”
So “I went back to my bug thing and I was working at the Museum of Natural History,” Miller said. Then he remarried and moved to the West Coast when his wife Charity got into graduate school in Seattle. “I worked as an independent contractor in entomology,” Miller said. “I studied tropical moths in South America and there aren’t a lot of people who know how to do that. The good thing is I can do it on my schedule. I don’t really have a boss.”
But he was missing playing music, so he started making connections. He ended up at a big music house party. “The first person I see, they’re playing a Ralph Stanley song, and I thought, ‘these are my people.’” Those people turned out to be Cahalen Morrison and Ethan Lawton, two young stalwarts of the Americana music scene. “We just started jamming all the time,” Miller said.
They started developing a sound, a kind of country music based in the Pacific Northwest, and in urban living, even as it drew from its rural Southern roots. They also found a strong sense of musical camaraderie and decided they should do something with that. They played out first as Cahalen Morrison and Country Hammer. But the idea kept moving. Morrison and Lawton already wrote songs. Miller had never done it. But he was tired of just playing backup.
“How about we do a different thing where we all contribute?” Miller recalled the conversation landing. “And that was a great thing for me because I was ready.”
“I’d never written a song in my life until 2016,” Miller added. But his songs ended up on the first Western Centuries album, Weight of the World, and the second album, last year’s Songs from the Deluge. And “we just finished our third record a couple weeks ago and we recorded it in Nashville, so look at me — I’m a songwriter!”
In the band’s latest round of recording, Miller said, “we got to explore in a more relaxed way how we would make a record…. you can pick out the personalities on each song, and I think that’s a pretty interesting development.”
Meanwhile, Western Centuries has been touring and growing its following ever since. They took on Nokosee Fields as a bass player. The band toured with Donna the Buffalo early on and has now struck out on its own, making fans one at a time across the country.
“It’s hard times out here. Longevity is huge,” Miller said. But “there’s no fast way…. If you’re going to have a band, and you want to write songs, and you want to make a statement, there’s no fast track.”
But he remains optimistic. “People who love good music will find it,” he said. “They will find the music they like, so you just got to hang in there.”
Western Centuries plays Cafe Nine on June 14, with Lyon Street Fire opening. Visit the club’s website for tickets and more information.