Miamon Miller

Violinist. Also member of The Garlic Band. Miamon Miller began his musical career as a classical violinist but became entranced with the world of folk music, joining the Aman Folk Ensemble in the 1970s and later becoming its Artistic Director. He studied ethnomusicology at UCLA, earning an MA and ABD whilst playing mariachi music in his spare time. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and spent a year living in Romania, studying Transylvanian folk music. Miamon is widely experienced in mainstream music and has recorded with many well-known artists including Neil Sedaka and Neil Diamond. He has also composed and arranged music for film and television productions ranging from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman to Arabs in Detroit, And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, Keeping Up With the Steins and the PBS documentary Swimming in Auschwitz. He has also composed for theater, most recently the score for the Polish Białystocki Teatr Lalek (Białystok’s enormously popular puppet theater) production Czarne Ptacki Białegostoku (The Black Birds of Białystok). In 1970, Miamon Miller stumbled into a Balkan music class at UCLA where he was an undergraduate. As a sort of class culmination exercise, the musicians played their limited repertoire at the Museum Folk Dance Café in Pasadena. In the intervening 45 years since those tentative first notes, he has become a fixture in Eastern European folk music. In the 70s and early 80s he was a musician with and later directed the Aman Folk Ensemble. During that period and subsequently, he played with many other groups including Pitu Guli, Bucovina Klezmer, Fuge Imaginea and Trei Arcuşi, to name just a few. Miamon was involved in the early days of the EEFC’s Balkan Music & Dance Workshops, teaching the first Romanian folk violin classes and the Trans-Carpathian ensemble at both Mendocino and East Coast workshops. He’s led bands at Kolo Festival, Stockton and Balkanalia!, and has played at numerous folk dance camps and folk festivals from coast to coast. Miamon is also involved in more mainstream music and has recorded with Neil(s) Sedaka and Diamond as well as other well-known artists. He has composed and arranged music for film and television in projects as diverse as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; Starring Pancho Villa; to Arabs in Detroit; and Keeping Up With the Steins, and additionally for legitimate theater with Blackbirds of Bialystok, which premiered in that Polish city in April 2012. Whether playing with mariachi or klezmer bands, Middle Eastern music or jazz, he approaches all styles with near-equal enthusiasm. Academically, he has an M.A. in ethnomusicology (UCLA) and studied Transylvanian folk music for a year in Romania on a Fulbright grant.