Miles Okazaki is an American musician based in New York City. He is known for his versatile approach to the guitar, his rhythmic approach to improvisation and composition, and his work in contemporary music theory.

Okazaki grew up in Port Townsend, Washington, a small town near the Olympic Mountains in the Pacific Northwest. He began music on classical guitar at age 6, and was playing regular gigs on electric guitar by age 14, after studying for several years at the Centrum Jazz Workshop. He received many awards as a guitarist throughout his early years, and eventually placed 2nd in the Thelonious Monk International Guitar Competition.

Okazaki moved to New York City in 1997 to pursue a career in music and begin writing his own material. His teacher on guitar at this time was Rodney Jones, who recommended him for his first gig, with Stanley Turrentine. Okazaki spent four years on the road with vocalist Jane Monheit, while also writing and rehearsing the music for his first album, Mirror, which was released independently. The album received a “Critics Pick” in the New York Times, calling it “a work of sustained collectivity as well as deep intricacy.” He expanded to a septet for his second album, Generations, described by pianist Vijay Iyer “the sonic equivalent of Escher or Borges, but with real emotional heft,”. His third album, Figurations, was recorded live with a quartet, and was selected as one of the New York Times top ten albums of 2012, described by Ben Ratliff as “slowly evolving puzzles of brilliant jazz logic.” In January of 2016 Okazaki recorded a new album, Trickster, that will be released in 2017 on Pi Recordings. Okazaki wrote, produced, and illustrated these albums.

As a sideman, Okazaki works in many areas, ranging from Standard repertoire to experimental music. Since 2008, he has had wide exposure as the guitarist for Steve Coleman and Five Elements. In recent years, he has worked with a variety of artists including Kenny Barron, Jonathan Finlayson, Amir El Saffar, Adam Rudolph, Dan Weiss, Linda Oh, Darcy James Argue, Jane Monheit, Vijay Iyer, Francois Moutin, Doug Hammond, Carl Allen, Ohad Talmor, Mary Halvorson, John Zorn, Jen Shyu, Mark Giuliana, Patrick Cornelius, Rajna Swaminathan, Matt Mitchell, Craig Taborn, Tony Moreno, Ben Wendel, Donny McCaslin, and many others.

Hailed by DownBeat as "one of the visionaries of the current wave", pianist Craig Taborn was born in Minneapolis in 1970 and was already active on the jazz scene during his time at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he met drummer and long-term collaborator Gerald Cleaver. They made their ECM debuts together in 1997 with Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory, and both play in Michael Formanek's quartet, an association documented on the ECM recordings The Rub And Spare Change and Small Places.
Making his ECM solo debut with Avenging Angel (2011) – and his first solo recording tout court, Taborn found fresh things to say in a voice entirely his own. John Fordham wrote of the album: “His musicality and his attention to detail is hypnotic... as is his remarkable sense of compositional narrative within a completely improvised performance”.
Two years later, drummer Gerald Cleaver and Thomas Morgan (double bass) joined Taborn to record Chants, the fruit of eight years’ experience of playing together as a trio. Taborn has emphasised the importance to him of the group as a partnership of equals: “I'd much rather engage with the group, always, than have the format be 'piano adventures with supporting cast'”.