Tuesdays with Miller

The sweet sound of a sax hits your ears. Coltrane is evident, but the sound is original. The ambience is intimate, the coffee you’re sipping tasty, and the crowd jibes with the performer. While you might think you’re in a hip café in Davis Square, the reality is that you only need to head up Garden Street to Hilles to experience this artful musical experiment, Acoustic Tuesdays.

Marcus G. Miller ’08, who performs at nearly every Acoustic Tuesday with pianist Malcolm G. Campbell ’10, describes the event as a venue that “creates a greater atmosphere of student creativity on campus.” Miller, who has been playing the saxophone since the age of nine and performing in gigs since age 13, says Acoustic Tuesdays have a “relaxed, kind of college-feel, [something] that sometimes is lacking at Harvard.”

Though Acoustic Tuesdays are also jazzed up by performers such as Jake M. McNulty ’11 and Juan Carlos Valdes Fernandez ’11, Miller and Campbell are the cornerstones of the weekly event. Miller discovered early in his college career that the Harvard atmosphere was not a music-friendly one, and without enough events like Acoustic Tuesdays, pursuing his passion would be harder than imagined.

“It’s a phenomenon with Harvard jazz musicians; the music just dies with people here,” Miller says. “It might be something spiritual or the lack of time but it sucks it out of you.”

As a graduating senior, Miller won’t be holding up the Tuesday tradition and performing next year, leaving the future of the event uncertain. One can only hope that a new guard of performers such as Campbell, McNulty and Valides Fernandez will keep the tradition alive and continue to breathe new life into Harvard’s lacking music scene.



—Ama R. Frances contributed to the reporting of this story