Most kids are afraid of their basements, but when New York-based drummer and composer Allison Miller was a kid, the basement was the place to be.
Miller’s father, John Terrell Miller, ran a home recording studio on the bottom floor of her childhood home outside of Washington D.C. The studio attracted a rotating cast of jazz greats, including William Thomas "Keter" Betts, a legendary D.C. bassist who played with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and contemporary jazz trumpeter Terrell Stafford.
Growing up, Miller would sit on the staircase and listen to musicians as much as she could. That simple act launched her 40-year career in music.
“Those musicians playing in my dad's basement became my role models. I was really fortunate that I was able to start gigging and playing with professional musicians by the time I was 12,” she said.
When KNKX caught up with Miller for this interview, the role model shoe was on the other foot. Miller is a 2026 faculty member at Jazz Port Townsend, the lauded jazz workshop and festival that takes place every July in Port Townsend, Washington.
Along with her foray into music, Miller discussed the challenges of being a woman in jazz, her optimism about the future of the tradition, and the distinctive jazz sound she hears coming from the Pacific Northwest; a place many of her collaborators have deep ties.
“It's different than the California jazz sound. It's more free. There's more experimentation,” she said. “You all have such a rich history and grunge, and I think that that crosses over to the jazz sound as well. And it's a different climate here. Your weather produces a certain kind of grit.”
A professional early
Miller got her musical start young. By the time she could talk, she was itching to play the drums. By her preteen years, she was playing with heavyweight musicians in a big band.
“My schooling was not in school. It was on stage, with those kind of older cats yelling at me, telling me what not to do,” she said.
“I remember, I'll never forget it, the first time I played with [Keter Betts] and he started taking a bass solo, and I played my bass drum, and he just looked at me while he was shredding an amazing solo, and said to me, ‘Stop playing your bass drum.’ I learned that way, the original way.”
Decades later, Miller is a celebrated jazz drummer, composer, and educator. In 2019, JazzTimes selected Miller as “Best Jazz Drummer” in their critics poll; the Jazz Journalist Association awarded her sextet Boom Tic Boom “Best Mid-Sized Ensemble”; and in 2018, NPR included one of her compositions in “The 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women+.”
Along with leading her own band, she’s collaborated with musicians across genres, including high-profile pop stars Brandi Carlile, Sara Bareilles and Ani DiFranco. She’s also part of the all-woman jazz supergroup, Artemis.
“Musically, [Artemis] is special. It's probably the band that I get the chance to really play the most straight-ahead. Boom Tic Boom is more about my composing, and my composing style is definitely not straight-ahead jazz. It’s more experimental and rocking in a sense,” Miller explained.
More than gender
Songs to check out by Allison Miller:
- "Big and Lovely" by Allison Miller and the One O'Clock Lab Band
- "Otis was a Polar Bear" by Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom
- "Congratulations and Condolences" by Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom
- "Fierce" by Allison Miller and the One O'Clock Lab Band
Even with all her cross-genre success, Miller said she’s faced her fair share of prejudice. In music, jazz in particular, women drummers are a rarity, though representation seems to be improving.
“It's a constant grind in this business as a woman musician, and especially, I think, a woman drummer…I'm 51. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I still get people coming up to me and be like, ‘Wow, you can really play,’” she said.
In college, she even had the eye-raising experience of having to audition twice for a band because the parents of the other students believed she was chosen because she was “a girl,” and “cute.”
“So, he had to audition me again with other people in the room, including those parents, and then I still got the position,” she said.
Along with performing with and composing for a wide array of groups, she’s also a busy educator. Miller is a part-time music faculty member at The New School in New York City, artistic director of Jazz Camp West in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a regular faculty member at Jazz Port Townsend and the Stanford Jazz Workshop.
As an educator, Miller gets a first-hand look at the future of jazz through the up-and-comers, which she notes embrace a diversity of identities and musical styles.
“A lot of the young musicians coming up, not all of them, but a healthy handful, are not thinking about gender when they're thinking about the music,” she said.
An optimistic future
Miller also noted a “resurgence in excitement” for jazz amongst young people. These developing musicians are in-tune with the tradition, but also making the music their own.
“There is a young movement who are really in tune with the tradition of the music, but not playing like they're in a museum. You know what I'm saying? There's a difference. We don't want to hear what someone did,” she said. “Don’t play like Dizzy Gillespie, because Dizzy already did that, you know?”
Jazz is moving in an exciting direction, she said, thanks to the music’s emphasis on in-person connection, congregation, and community; things that so many of us crave in the age of constant smartphone use.
“This is human music. This is the kind of music that's supposed to go late-night and be in a smoky bar, you know. We don't have that anymore, but there's a grittiness to this music, and there's a sense of real humanity in this music that's super special,” Miller said.
Miller’s career is also moving in an exciting direction. Last year, as a resident scholar in jazz composition at Berklee College of Music, Miller wrote a host of new compositions that she recently recorded. She has two new releases coming in 2027: a trio record with Seattle-bred pianist Carmen Staaf and bassist Rufus Reid, and a new project with Boom Tic Boom called Get Some Good Dreams.
