Natasha Miller: Press

Natasha Miller a standout at this point in her budding career

34-year-old singer scored critical success with "I Had a Feelin’: The Bobby Sharp Songbook,"

By CHARLES LEVIN
Sentinel correspondent Jazz musicians rarely sit still. They don’t rest on laurels. Scratching the itch for a new challenge always seems to trump the urge to play it safe and do the same old thing. New songwriters. New instruments. New styles.

Which makes Natasha Miller something of a standout at this point in her budding career.

Last year, the 34-year-old singer scored critical success with "I Had a Feelin’: The Bobby Sharp Songbook," a collection of poignant ballads by an unknown octogenarian tunesmith.

On the heels of that effort, however, Miller didn’t head off in another direction. Instead, she recorded a second album of songs by Sharp, who wallowed for years in obscurity until chance brought them together.

Miller just couldn’t walk away from what she believed was the discovery of a lifetime — Sharp’s catalog, a treasure trove of undiscovered songs that rivaled anything in the "Great American Songbook."

On Sunday, Miller and Sharp will perform songs from "Feelin’" and a forthcoming January release, "Don’t Move" (both on her Poignant Records label), at the 48th annual Monterey Jazz Festival Presented by MCI.

Miller’s resolve is rooted in how she met Sharp, a story that will help readers asking the question, Bobby Who?

Sharp wrote pop-jazz songs in the late 1950s and 1960s, peddling them to publishers around New York’s Tin Pan Alley. He abandoned the music business after licking a nasty heroin addiction and worked for several years as a drug rehabilitation counselor.

By early 2003, Sharp was retired and living in Alameda — in his words "driving around" — when he first heard Miller. She was singing live on KCSM, the San Mateo-based public radio station.

With her "clear" and "pure" vocals, Sharp thought he’d found the perfect muse for his songs.

Miller told the radio host she lived in Alameda. So does Sharp. Later that night, he looked her up in the phone book and asked if he could send her a cassette of some songs he’d written.

Miller recalled the conversation with self-deprecating humor. She often gets calls from songwriters who want to pitch her unsuitable material.

"I thought, ‘OK, someone’s calling me at home. This is going to get weird,’ " she said in a recent phone interview.

But at the other end of the phone line, she recognized a kind soul. Miller agreed to hear Sharp’s songs but privately waxed skeptical. Just before Sharp hung up, however, he unwittingly unhinged that skepticism.

"He said, ‘Well, you might have known one of the songs I wrote,’ " she recalled, conceding that she privately thought otherwise.

Sharp said it was "Unchain My Heart," the 1961 hit for Ray Charles and later for Joe Cocker.

"And at that point, I said (to myself), ‘Sit up straight, listen, pay this man a little more attention. He’s the real deal,’ " Miller said.

Sharp sent Miller a package of yellowed, dog-eared sheet music, redolent of nicotine. It also contained a cassette of himself singing and playing piano. The tape’s quality was subpar, but the music was nothing like the raucous, gospel-tinged Charles hit.

Sharp writes languorous ballads and bouncy swing tunes, a perfect fit for Miller’s sassy, soulful delivery.

First came "My Magic Tower," the sorrowful fantasy of a man bent on unrequited love. More cassettes followed. Each tune was a winner.

Blown away by the music, she was even more stunned they’d gone unheard for years. Over coffee at their first meeting, she vowed to find Sharp an audience.

Miller decided to sing "My Magic Tower" and a ballad version of "Unchain My Heart" at a local concert.

Miller, however, was nine months pregnant and suddenly lost her child. She was confined to bed, recovering from kidney and liver damage.

At home, she tried singing "Over the Rainbow," a sentimental favorite, but her voice wouldn’t cooperate. Miller was certain she’d never sing again.

But the strains of "My Magic Tower" were firmly implanted in her mind. So was the promise to perform his music.

About two months later, Miller called her pianist, who transposed the song to her key, and the two began rehearsing.

"That kind of lit a fuse, and then I said, ‘Oh forget it. I’m done with this being sick,’ " she said.

Miller performed the song at a concert series. She invited Sharp to the gig, uncertain if he would attend. But Sharp arrived.

"I think he was very touched," Miller said. "I think it was overwhelming for him to see, finally after all of these years, someone not just paying attention to the songs, but really doing something with it."

Miller grew up in Iowa, where she studied classical violin (she still wields a fiddle at her gigs), and sang with her pianist father from the time she was a toddler. She attended college on a music scholarship and played first violin with the Iowa State Symphony.

By 2001, Miller was a working, single mother, pulling down $80,000 a year at an East Bay advertising agency. The work, however, was unsatisfying.

She quit to pursue music and traded life in a three-bedroom Alameda home for a tiny apartment, expecting a drop in income.

It didn’t quite happen. Today she manages an entertainment agency, books herself and other acts, and sings and writes in a host of styles that keep her on the go.

Sharp grew up in Harlem. He spent his youth listening to Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington — principal songwriting influences — at the Savoy Ballroom and Apollo Theatre. After a stint without the U.S. Army, he attended Greenwich School of Music and Manhattan School of Music.

He sang for a week each with Benny Carter’s and Jimmy Lunceford’s bands and briefly collaborated with other songwriters.

He wrote "Unchain My Heart" at a Wurlitzer electric piano in the living room of his parents’ house while they watched Perry Mason on TV in the next room.

"I just tried to write something catchy and simple," Sharp said during an interview, adding he has little emotional attachment to the song now. "In fact, to this day, I don’t know if I could sit down and play it through."

Sharp sold the tune for $50 to producer Teddy Powell, who demanded half the writing credit. To avoid a contractual hassle, Sharp substituted his cousin’s name, Agnes Jones, as the writer.

Sharp later wrote "Don’t Set Me Free," a lesser-known song for Charles. In 1963, he sold his share of both tunes to Powell for $1,000. The money fed his drug habit.

Two years later, Sharp hired an attorney and sued Powell. The producer settled in 1970, giving Sharp the rights to both tunes and the copyright to "Unchain My Heart" when it ran out in 1988.

Sharp wrote his last tune in 1978 and, soon after, kicked drugs. He also said goodbye to music.

He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1980 and put in eight years as a drug rehab counselor. Just as retirement loomed and he prepared to take over the copyright, Joe Cocker scored a hit with "Unchain My Heart."

In a phone interview, Sharp seemed a bit detached from the success that finally blessed a man starting his eighth decade of life (he turns 81 in November).

Asked how it’s all changed him, Sharp suggested that the success belongs to Miller. He was also somewhat mum on the meaning of playing Monterey, one of the world’s most prestigious jazz venues.

"I had no idea it that it would come to this," Sharp conceded, in a voice that suggested a much younger age. "I’m not the one who likes to appear, per se. Natasha’s the one who likes to be on the stage."

Still, Sharp conceded that he’s warmed by the audience response when Miller brings him onstage to sing some tunes at her shows.

Last month, they performed at Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco. Sharp sang one tune, but swept up in an uncharacteristic show of emotion, gave the crowd two more.

"When I walked off the stage, people were just yelling. It was almost like a standing ovation," Sharp said, pausing, and then finished with a hint of reluctance to his voice, "which was kinda great."

Hollywood has taken notice. A team of Tinseltown types is shopping the story for a possible film or TV project.

Miller has no regrets about turning her attention to Sharp’s music a second time around. The new CD, which uses Bay Area and Los Angeles musicians, pushed her to new heights, she said.

Miller probably won’t record a third album of Sharp’s music. But she may sprinkle future CDs with a few of his tunes.

"I have a long career ahead of me," she said. "But Bobby is 80, and he really didn’t get to enjoy his career as a songwriter. But I think we’re making up for that in a big way right now."

Natasha Miller, with guest artist Bobby Sharp, performs Sunday at the Monterey Jazz Festival at 2 and 3:30 p.m. at the Starbucks Coffeehouse Gallery.


Contact Charles Levin at wmlevinotd@earthlink.net