Jazz drummer Allison Miller plays tonight at Mercyhurst

Bassist Lindsey Horner brought a band stocked with wonderful players to the 2006 Erie Art Museum Blues and Jazz Festival -- one of them a terrific, relatively unknown young drummer who played with a beat that kept the music airborne while moving it relentlessly forward.

That was Allison Miller, who will return to Erie tonight with another terrific band, her own sextet Boom Tic Boom, for a can't-miss concert at Mercyhurst University's Walker Recital Hall.

Miller has powered the bands of the singers Brandi Carlile, Ani DiFranco and Natalie Merchant, and she can frequently be seen in the drums chair on "Late Night with Seth Meyers," but by her own admission, she came late to rock drum styles.

"My first gig like that was with Natalie," Miller said.

"I think I was 23, and I had no idea of how to play in front of thousands of people," she said. "My first show was in front of like 30,000 people at the United Center in Chicago, and I was completely freaking out. I remember thinking, this is so different from a bebop gig."

Bebop, the swinging, highly technical style that has been a foundational part of the jazz language for 65 years, came naturally to Miller.

"I'm from right outside D.C., and I got my swing history and chops from D.C. musicians. I think the D.C. ... feeling is swinging and bouncy."

That's certainly the Miller rhythmic feeling, even when Boom Tic Boom isn't playing traditional jazz swing time. That's often the case. And unlike a lot of jazz being played these days, Miller's compositions, while packed with incident and detail, never feel overstuffed.

"I find that in today's modern jazz movement, silence and space are lacking," she said. "It's almost like people have too much technique, and they forget that they don't always have to play."

There's no shortage of technique among the members of Boom Tic Boom: Ben Goldberg, clarinet; Kirk Knuffke, cornet; Jenny Scheinman, violin; Todd Sickafoose, bass; and pianist Gary Versace, who is subbing for founding member Myra Melford on this tour. All of them are among the leading voices on their instruments.

But what makes Boom Tic Boom stand out is how the individual brilliance of the players is integrated into a tightly organized yet spontaneous-sounding ensemble, and Miller gives them a lot to work with.

She is a terrific writer, and her arrangements are kaleidoscopic and full of surprise

"I feel like these musicians use their ears and go wherever (the music) takes us. I always feel like they improvise from a place of pure music and being in the moment."

Being in the moment is more important than ever. Miller and her partner's first child, Josie, was born recently.

"I knew it would change my life," she said of becoming a parent, "but I had no idea how profoundly it would change my life and how I think about creativity of music. Now, when I'm traveling on a plane or in a hotel room, I immediately break out my keyboard and write. It's like a vacation."

Most of the compositions on Boom Tic Boom's new CD, "Otis Was a Polar Bear," were written in that way.

"I'm the kind of musician who has to be expressing my creativity and writing, and even though I know I'm going to be exhausted, I do it anyway," she said.

"I'm like a snake. I go between the jazz world and the rock world, and sometimes I'll disappear into a rock tour bus for a year."

Miller and her band will showcase "Otis Was a Polar Bear" at venerable music venues across the country, including Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola -- Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and MASS MoCA. But tonight they'll lift the bandstand at Walker Recital Hall, and it just might be the jazz event of the year.