The opening weekend of the EFG London Jazz Festival, and the world's coolest thumbslinger was in town, wielding not one but three bass guitars and leading a crack band of musical brothers whose empathetic exchanges verged on the spiritual.
Thirty years in, two Grammys along and Marcus Miller is still at the top of his game, showing off the chops - that crazy funky pluck-and-slap bass technique - that made him a session player for artists so great they go by one name: Dizzy. Herbie. Aretha. Beyoncé. Elton. Miles.
Particularly Miles. Miller was Davis's musical co-pilot in the 1980s, variously arranging, writing and playing on effects-laden, epoch-defining albums including Tutu, whose title track Miller revisits complete with dramatic opening strikes, all the more arresting for lights that shrouded him in an eerie red mist.
When you tour as much as Miller does, you know how to put on a show. There was the virtuosic set that balanced fan favourites including Panther and the horn-driven Detroit with the dynamic fretless-back-to-fretted likes of Untamed from 2018's Laid Black. There was stagecraft that saw altoist Donald Hayes and trumpeter Russell Gunn fall back into the shadows when not playing, then reconfigure again on different marks.
There was Miller, tall and lean in his trademark black pork pie hat, maintaining the pace, directing the musicians, crossing genres and styles; playing solo lines with so much melody and feeling he'd close his eyes then head into bouts of intricate, finger busting imagineering.
Part showman, part musical shaman, he demanded and got the absolute best from his sidemen; on Mr Pastorius, a tune Miller wrote in tribute to jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius that features on Davis's album Amandla, Gunn played horn as if astral-travelling, arching over his instrument and moaning, once, with the supreme effort.
And then there was alto saxophone star Camilla George, who'd earlier treated us to an acclaimed sound that blends melodic patterns from West Africa and the cross-cultural grit and zing of London into something golden and hopeful.
Miller invited George onstage for Mr Pastorius, and her inventive, lyrical maelstrom of notes so impressed him ("Did she do her thing or what?") that he brought her back for the encore, a jazz-funk take on The Beatles' Come Together. He'd addressed our fractured world in his spoken introduction to Gorée, a song of peace played on calm, honeyed bass clarinet and inspired "by the strength of our ancestors to endure".
