Collection: Miles Mosley

Miles Mosley was named after Miles Davis, grew up in Hollywood, California, and studied upright bass with John Clayton, Ray Brown and Al McKibbon before committing to a professional music career in the early 2000s. The decade that followed was spent building a session and touring résumé that ran from Lauryn Hill and Mos Def through Jeff Beck, Joni Mitchell and Jonathan Davis of Korn, and on to scoring video games, film and television alongside his live work. None of it pointed obviously toward the West Coast Get Down. But the WCGD was the project where everything crystallised: a Los Angeles collective built around Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Ronald Bruner Jr., Cameron Graves, Ryan Porter and Terrace Martin that drew from jazz, soul, funk and hip-hop without dividing the influences into separate compartments. Mosley and Thundercat gave the collective its bass voice, and when Kendrick Lamar's team needed musicians for "To Pimp a Butterfly," they called the collective: Mosley played on three tracks. His debut solo album "Uprising" (Verve, 2017), featuring the West Coast Get Down, drew on 1970s soul and funk as much as jazz, built around Mosley's upright bass played with a bow, effects pedals and his own voice, in a style that several critics reached for Jimi Hendrix analogies to describe before settling for calling it something new. "Abraham," the lead single, was named one of NPR's Top 100 songs of 2016. The album debuted at number four on the Billboard Contemporary Jazz chart. He remains active as a leader, composer, session musician and producer.