Steve Million

Having become a familiar presence within Chicago’s jazz community beginning in 1988, pianist Steve Million issued his first album as a leader in the mid-1990s. The Palmetto release Million To One featured Randy Brecker and Chris Potter. Steve Million recalls meeting and conversing with Count Basie at age seven. Although he experimented briefly with the piano during childhood, serious engagement with music did not begin until high school. He completed one year at North Texas State before turning to classical training at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Between 1978 and 1980 he maintained steady employment in the Kansas City vicinity, lived for a year in New York, returned to Kansas City, and then served from 1984 to 1988 as musical director for blues singer Ida McBeth. After settling in Chicago in 1988 he advanced to the semi-finals of the Thelonious Monk Piano Competition and has since performed in varied contexts alongside Kevin Mahogany, Von Freeman, Carmell Jones, Slide Hampton, and Ira Sullivan, among numerous others. For a period Million directed an unconventional piano-organ-drums group named Monk’s Dream devoted exclusively to Thelonious Monk compositions.