This project started in 1996 when I began to distribute the list of my own
Marcus Miller records to various newsgroups and asked people to help me in putting together
a complete discography.
Soon thereafter I got to know Jorgen Asklin and Mats Hagervik, two MM fans from Sweden.
Jorgen, Mats, and I put together a little website,
"The Marcus
Miller Page",
which still exists.
In spring 1997, I changed my ISP and got my own 2 MB of webspace where I assembled
my own MM website. (Jorgen and Mats were busy with other things and didn't have
enough time to update the website on a regular basis.) This was the birth of
"A Marcus Miller Site" which at that time only consisted of the
discography and some sound examples.
In summer 1997, I visited the "Northsea Jazz Festival" in The Hague to
see "Legends". By chance, I met Marcus after the concert and talked to him
about the two websites. Marcus was very interested and offered to answer fans' questions,
and this is what he has been doing since then. He also contributes news about
his current projects, his tour schedules, and other stuff.
In the first few months the Q&A process (which is now the Discussion Board) was maintained manually - I sent the
questions to Marcus and typed them (and his replies) directly into the HTML files.
When the website became well-known (through search engines and articles in some magazines) and
the traffic increased, I had to program some CGI scripts that did the work for me.
In November 1997, I made a business trip to the United States and met Marcus in L.A.
During this meeting we decided to move the website to its own domain
"marcusmiller.com". Since then, Marcus has been paying for the domain name
and the server rent.
In 1999, the tenth anniversary issue of "Bass Player Magazine" featured marcusmiller.com as one of the Top 10 Cool web sites of the '90s... :)
Thanks to the kindness of Marcus (who answers the website questions almost daily), this website became kind of semi-official and has now
arrived at about 200,000 page views per month.
In July/August 2002, the site was completely re-done, graphically as well as technically. The new graphical design was done by Manfred Spiller while I rewrote all the technical underpinnings. The site is now based on a PostGreSQL database and served through a mixture of PHP and Perl. Almost all content is dynamically generated. The Javascript menu on the left side is a slightly modified version of the Milonic Popup DHTML Navigational menu. (Well, actually the JS code isn't really modified but generated on the fly on a page-to-page basis by the PHP code.)
Many people have
helped in providing information,
filling gaps, or correcting my mistakes. These
include:
- Mike Abner
- Faris Al-Badri
- Jorgen Asklin
- Rolf Baumgarten
- Patrick Berndt
- Henri Blakenburg
- George Cole
- Chris Cowley
- Dee Cernille
- André Derouaux
- Knut Helge Drivenes
- Kim Davis
- Steve Dixon
- Karsten Engel
- Dietmar Engelke
- Big Doug Epting
- Larry Fergerson
- Seth Gerkin
- Matthias Glubrecht
- Mats Hagervik
- Ben Harmsen
- Satoru Ishida
- Jim Jennett
- Jude Kelly
- Jan Kooy
- Lutz Krämer
- Arturo Kubota
- Kari Kurki-Suonio
- Etsuko Kusukawa
- Steven Lieblich
- Libby (Libster)
- Piotr Marek
- Steve Menashe
- Eric Miklas
- David Montanès
- Taku Okuno
- Ted Perlman
- Miguel Angel Piccolo
- Derrin Pinto
- Marc Reichling
- Mark van Schaick
- Paul Sips
- Manfred Spiller
- Luc Stakenborg
- Yoshiaki Takaoka
- Paul Tingen
- Dina Torok
- George van Veen
- Espen Waage
- Brent Ward
- George C. Williams
Thanks to y'all!
Special thanks to Hiroshi (Harry) Matsuda for providing tons of
information for the discography, to Gesi for pointing into
the right direction, and to Bibi Green for sending lots of information and inside stuff.
Special thanks to my wife Heike Stephan who
drew the icons for the first incarnation of this site and who is always patient
when I spend hours in front of my computer.
Very special thanks to Marcus Miller for help, information and
updates, for his willingness to answer questions,
for his music, and for everything else.
My name is Edi Weitz.
I'm living in Hamburg, Germany, where I work as a free-lance
application developer. This website is a private, non-commercial, non-profit project that I'm working on in my
spare time, I'm not compensated for it.
