"Kevin Miller (born January 24, 1998) is a guitarist, composer, and music educator who has been described as a "substantial improviser with a convincing technique and robust imagination." (AllAboutJazz)

Kevin has released music through labels including Creative Sources Recordings, Ramble Records, Plus Timbre, Nachstück Records, and MuteAnt Sounds.

Kevin's discography consists of solo recordings, as well as duo recordings with musicians including Dan Blake, Samo Salamon, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, and Richard Mariconda. Some of Kevin's recordings have been featured on programs such as BBC Radio, KOWS Radio, Space is the Place Radio, and Framework Radio. Kevin also does work as a guest guitar soloist for hire.

In 2023, Kevin published Outside Sounds and Substitutions for Modern Jazz Guitar via publisher Mel Bay.

In 2025, Kevin will be publishing his second book for Mel Bay, titled An Advanced Approach to Practicing Jazz Guitar."

"Most artists who record an album as enthusiastically reviewed as The Aquarian Suite (2012), saxophonist Dan Blake's scintillating up-to-the-minute take on postbop - "one of the most ridiculously satisfying discs we've heard in some time," crowed the Boston Phoenix - would be eager to follow it up with something in the same vein. And that's just what he's done with The Digging (Sunnyside Records, 2016), a trio foray that features Eric Harland on drums. Blake's music has been called "stunning" (All About Jazz), for his work touring and recording both with his own projects and with luminaries of jazz and popular music like three-time Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding, NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton, Velvet Underground founding member John Cale and many others. His most recent release Da Fé (Sunnyside Records) - featuring legendary drummer Jeff Williams, pianists Carmen Staaf and Leo Genovese (who also plays an array of synthesizers), and bassist Dmitry Ishenko - was called "the perfect soundtrack for building a better world" (Monarch Magazine).

The Boston Globe has said Blake "regards tradition as a welcoming playground best approached with a sense of wonder and adventure." A frequent collaborator in this playground is the protean Argentine pianist Leo Genovese, whose recording Seeds (Palmetto) features Blake, who the New York Times called a "virtuoso." Downbeat writes that Blake "brings an intelligence and taste for adventure but also a solid swing and tradition-hugging mandate to his work as both player and writer."

One of those reasons is his burgeoning relationship with the Mivos Quartet, a leading new music chamber group for which he was commissioned to composer a new work by the Jerome Fund for New Music, with support from New Music USA's Composer Assistance Program. The project saw its release at New York's 2016 "Winter Jazzfest" and is now a feature-length DVD on the Infrequent Seams label. His work with Braxton led to an invitation for Blake to compose for the maestro's "Tricentric Orchestra". Blake has also received commissions to compose for recorderist Terri Hron, the Paris-based Spring Roll Quartet, the Dr. Faustus new music series, and the North/South Consonance Ensemble.

Beyond specific projects, Blake is simply an artist who lives for all manner of collaborations, as a composer as well as a tenor and soprano saxophonist. "That's the single most important thing to me," he said. "When you work with people, you inhabit some sort of world together, this feeling of connection. It's not about imposing an aesthetic ideal. Music represents the value of those relationships. It makes a powerful ethical statement."

In Blake's world, those collaborations can involve departed as well as living artists, as witness his ongoing relationship with onetime teacher Steve Lacy via his solo saxophone performances and hours of practicing long tones, scale patterns, circular breathing and multiphonics. "Lacy said playing solo was extremely important, but not to do it too much or I'd get too much into my own world. My approach involves just exploding my instrument, waiting for that point where an accident occurs, whether it's a squeak or a slip, and trying to do it again. I find that area of the instrument and exploit it through exploration."

Blake also has been happily tested by his many collaborations with the likes of pianist Danilo Perez, another onetime teacher of his, on whose "Panama Suite" he was featured, and percussionist-composer Lukas Ligeti (son of Gyorgy), in whose band he has played. But his experiences with the Mivos Quartet - violinists Olivia De Prato and Lauren Cauley, violist Victor Lowrie and cellist Mariel Roberts - have proven especially revelatory.

"I know it sounds strange, but I discovered with them that I could be a composer and also be myself," said Blake. "In the past, preparing a score and delivering it to the ensemble never quite got me there. Mivos is a classical group, but they got it right away, which was a big lesson for me. They charted out my writing for improvisation. The music is constructed in real time, organically. Things have great flexibility: A cello solo can go on for 30 seconds or 10 minutes. When the the right switch is sparked and things take off, it's amazing.

After acquiring a master's in composition from the Conservatory at the Brooklyn College of Music in 2008, he earned a Ph.D. in composition from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2013. His dissertation: "Performed Identities: Theorizing in New York's Improvised Music Scene," a subject he knew quite a lot about, having interviewed such brilliant players as Mary Halvorson, Ricardo Gallo, Peter Evans and James Ilgenfritz.

Blake's composition teachers included modern classical composers Robert Dick, Tania Leon, Jason Eckhardt and John McDonald; his influences included Karlheinz Stockhausen and Anthony Braxton. It's not surprising that his approach to improvisation was quite different from that of his friends trained in jazz.

As an educator, Dan Blake is active in the area of arts and social justice, which he teaches as part-time Assistant Professor at the New School for Social Research. He is the recipient of a 2022 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in music for his work creating the ballet and social justice project Got My Wings, an initiative that encourages students to use the arts as a vehicle for thinking about social justice issues. The project received a Humanities New York grant in 2023 to bring a new arts and social justice curriculum to high school students and educators."