Miles Away Jazz Combo

Featuring Elaine Miles Jazz Vocalist

I’m not a girly-girl," laughs Elaine Miles. "You can’t be a girly-girl and do jazz. Jazz has got balls. It’s not whiny, or weak, it’s a strong woman’s sound. But it’s not in your face because it’s never loud. It’s just right."

For Elaine Miles, becoming a jazz singer was something she'd been dreaming about ever since childhood. I used to corner kids on the playground and make them listen to me sing." But before she could realize that dream, Miles had a major obstacle to overcome. She openly admits the catalyst for her successful conversion from wannabe to professional singer was attaining her sobriety.

"I finally crawled out of a bottle and decided to stop chasing a dream and catch it. I’d wasted enough time and didn’t want to sit around and regret. I looked at my options and thought, ‘I can do 100 different things I don’t care about, or I can have the nerve to do the one thing I’ve always wanted and I’d better do it today.’

Once she started, she found a lot of help along the way. "A lot of musicians retire to Orange County and they have so much knowledge to impart. All you have to do is tell them you want to hear it. I listened to everything everybody had to say. You just open your ears and shut your mouth. I had such great support right off the bat. I’d call up people I didn’t know and offer them gigs for almost no money and they’d say okay. True musicians just want to make good music. It’s not about the money or we wouldn’t be in jazz in the first place."

An immediate attention-getter when hearing Miles' singing is her unique musical interpretation. She makes a song truly her own without adding unnecessary frills. She says it took a while to get to that point. "The more experience you get in any art form, the more ‘less’ appeals to you. When you first start out it’s the big bright and loud that attracts you, then you keep whittling away until you find out what’s beautiful underneath. For the sound I appreciate, you don’t need a lot of people, just two or three really good ones. That’s what I like to listen to, so that’s what I like to do.

Although well known in Orange County, Miles first began gathering fans in LA after sitting in with Jeff Goldblum’s Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, at the mid- Wilshire club, Level One. "What a great band," she recalls. "They have a really clean and simple jazz sound. They let people sit in and lot of them pick the big boomy songs that aren’t fun for the instrumentalists to play. So on my first time with them they thought I was going to ask for something like ‘My Funny Valentine'. I asked, ‘Can we do some Monk?’ and they all went ‘Yeah!’ We just got down and they just kept asking me back."

For Miles, it's all about making good music.

I’m glad for whatever comes my way and I’m so lucky right now. Wherever I go if there’s jazz they’ll ask me to sit in. Monday night I finished a four-hour gig and went over to this place to get a bite to eat and before I could even order they called me up and asked ‘will you sing?’ ‘Hell yeah!’"

(reprint from Venice Magazine, September, 2004)