Mac Miller

Mac Miller (1992-2018), American rapper, singer and producer from Pittsburgh, was one of the most endearing figures of a hip-hop generation open to jazz, soul and funk. The Montreux Jazz Festival welcomed him in 2014, on the Jazz Lab stage.

Mac Miller: Live the Lab

2014: a night at the Jazz Lab

In July 2014, during the 48th edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival, Mac Miller set the Montreux Jazz Lab — the contemporary-music stage — alight, with the rapper Earl Sweatshirt opening. At twenty-two, the young man from Pittsburgh was on the rise, crowned by the success of “Watching Movies with the Sound Off”.

The festival kept and released this concert under the title “Live the Lab”. Mac Miller died on 7 September 2018, at twenty-six; that Montreux night remains one of the precious traces of his time on stage.

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The rapper who loved jazz

If his presence at the Montreux Jazz Lab made sense, it was because Mac Miller was not only a rapper: a lover of jazz and soul, he played piano and guitar, took the stage with a real band, and had even recorded a crooner record under the alias Larry Lovestein. “Watching Movies with the Sound Off” (2013), with its melancholy, jazzy production, already marked that turn.

From EPs with Pharrell Williams to the albums “The Divine Feminine” and “Swimming”, he never stopped widening his music until his premature death in 2018. At Montreux, his place was a natural one.