Talk about keeping yourself busy. Jane Miller might be one of the most dedicated musicians in New England right now. Not only is the guitarist and songwriter currently touting her new album Boats, she’s also a guitar professor at Berklee College of Music, where she works on campus and abroad. And as if that wasn’t enough, she’s written her own book, Introduction to Jazz Guitar, and is a contributing editor for Acoustic Guitar magazine.

Miller, however, isn’t one to gloat. The modest and soft-spoken Fitchburg native just loves music.

“It was always there,” she said, when asked about her earliest encounter with it. “I have memories of when I was toddler and sitting at the piano. It’s just part of my brain; it has always been in there. There’s always something brewing in my mind’s ear.”

Nowadays, Miller plays all over the state. But she first got her start in Central Massachusetts, performing in local coffeehouses and restaurants, including ones in Worcester.

She was also a volunteer with Jazz Worcester, an organization that promoted local concerts, and hosted her own jazz show at WCUW.

“For me, it was an extension of my record collection,” Miller said of being in radio. “Doing a radio show was like a cool way to extend that hobby and meet the people that play it.”

Her experience in radio and as a concert producer ultimately made her realize one thing: She wanted to focus her energy and commit more of her time to being a musician.

“It’s funny because both of those things put me on the other side of musical experience, interviewing musicians and helping to produce concerts,” she said. “It was great experience for taking care of that sort of business, but it also made me realize that I wanted to be on the other side of the mic, to play and write music.”

The radio and Jazz Worcester associations helped open the door to more solo gigging opportunities for Miller, who, at first, included singing in her performances.
“I thought if I wanted a gig, I should probably learn to sing,” she said. “I was never a singer, and I didn’t want to be. I can hear the pitches and I’m musical enough to sing, but I’m not like a singer, capital ‘S.’”

Eventually, she decided to drop the vocals and focus on what she enjoyed most – her guitar and writing instrumental music.

“I got smart enough to focus on the instrumental music I was writing and put a band together to help get that out, and that’s where it has remained, and I’ve been on that trajectory since then,” she said.

While honing what she wanted her performances to consist of may have started when she was older, her interest in the guitar and teaching started at a much younger age.

A woman named Lauren Weber, who taught folk guitar on television, caught Miller’s eye one day when she was a child. At the time, she had already taken piano lessons, but there was something about the guitar that drew her. A guitar happened to be sitting around the house, and things fell into place.

“Someone had an old, beat-up guitar, so I started to learn from playing that and watching the lessons on TV,” she said. “It was so much fun to hear what she was doing and to do it myself. It was the tone of the wooden acoustic guitar; it all just felt right.”

Now, Jane finds herself with a guitar in hand and teaching others as a part-time guitar professor at the Berklee College of Music.

For more than 20 years, Miller has taught a wide variety of music courses and also serves as an instructor for private lessons at the music school. Always the performer, she takes part in concerts and recitals at Berklee, as well. She developed a course based on a chapter in her book – Visualizing Chords – a lab focused on helping students to look at chords in a different way, with an emphasis on improvising.

When she’s not helping students here in the States, she’s traveling the world as part of an initiative for Berklee to find other talented musicians from places as far away as Seoul, South Korea.

“It’s been a great experience for me to get to get to know some different cultures and different countries and meet the applicants and play music with them,” she said. “I always have my guitar and play with them.”

Some places that she has traveled to, such as Buenos Aires, provided her with inspiration for new album.

Her fifth record, Boats, is a crisp jazz and folk hybrid, with plenty of improvisation and memorable guitar work. It was recorded at Berklee as part of a grant that awarded studio time and is mainly an instrumental album, except for the last song, “American Wave,” which features rare vocals from Miller.

“To me, boats on the ocean is kind of a good image for this boundary-less existence where things all kind of meld together and there’s a merging of styles, so a lot of this material is internationally mixed,” she said about the new album.

Tom Easton, who mixed and mastered Boats, said that Miler knew exactly what she wanted the album to sound like.

“She had a definite vision for where she wanted to the record to go,” he said. “She’s very easy to work with and balanced with knowing what she wants. It helps so much when somebody has a vision for what they want.”

With so many different things going on at once, how does Miller feel about rests in between? Lately, she has learned to enjoy the breaks when she gets them.

“I’ve come to learn that when I have down time, I accept it,” she said. “I have a pretty quiet life with my dog, and if that needs to be a priority from time to time, I go with that. The balance between city life and being out in the country is a good one for me, and I’ve come to appreciate both.”

For more information, visit JaneMillerGroup.com.

Jason Savio