Neal Miner was born February 3, 1970, and raised in Manhattan. His first teacher was his father, Bill Miner, a respected jazz record collector and discographer whose vast collection and frequent trips to clubs and concerts kindled a passion for the music in his son from an early age — Miner grew up hearing jazz in the house before he ever picked up a bass. He received his high school diploma from the Interlochen Arts Academy and went on to the Manhattan School of Music. His most notable private teachers pulled from both sides of the bass world: classical bassist Orin O'Brien of the New York Philharmonic, and jazz bassist John Webber, giving him a grounding in both traditions that shows up in the combination of rhythmic drive and tonal control critics consistently single out in his playing.

Since age nineteen, Miner has been a fixture of the New York City jazz scene, working as a freelance bassist across two overlapping worlds: backing vocalists and backing straight-ahead instrumentalists, often in the same week. His confirmed recording credits stretch from 1999's Easy Living with Ann Hampton Callaway through 2025 releases with Cory Weeds and Rachael & Vilray, an unbroken quarter-century-plus of session and bandstand work. Among rising jazz stars and contemporaries he has recorded or performed with are Larry Goldings, Harry Allen, Russell Malone, Peter Bernstein, David Hazeltine, Dena DeRose, Ann Hampton Callaway, Champian Fulton, Warren Vaché, and Loston Harris; among jazz legends, James Moody, Frank Wess, David Allyn, Eddie Locke, and Etta Jones. He has toured and recorded with Jon Hendricks since the late 1990s — a 2007 live recording from Birdland with Hendricks' group L, H & R Redux is among the documented evidence of that partnership — and has backed Annie Ross steadily since 2005, confirmed by her 2005 studio album Let Me Sing as well as her long-running weekly engagement at New York's Metropolitan Room. He joined Jane Monheit's band in 2007 and appears on her albums The Lovers, The Dreamers And Me (2009), Home (2010), and The Songbook Sessions: Ella Fitzgerald (2016), performing with her at major festivals, jazz clubs, and concert halls worldwide.

Miner is also the founder of Gut String Records, the small NYC label that has released the bulk of his own leader output since 2009 as well as albums by close collaborators — pianist Ehud Asherie's Music Makes Me (2014, on which Miner both plays bass and produces), Champian Fulton's The Breeze And I (2011), Doron Tirosh's debut Simply Because It's Winter (2018, alongside pianist Michael Kanan), and bassist-adjacent production work like Jamale Davis's Workers' Comp (2018), which Miner produced and recorded without playing on it. That producer's ear — recording, mixing, running a label on top of playing — is part of why his own leader sessions tend to sound as clean and unfussy as they do.

As a leader, Miner has recorded seven albums matching his own official tally: The Real Neal (2000, Juniper Records), his debut, made with guitarist Chris Bergson, drummer Joe Strasser, and tenor saxophonist Doug White; The Evening Sound (2006, Smalls Records), a sextet date with Chris Byars, Richie Vitale, John Mosca, Steve Ash, and Tom Melito; Happy Hour (2009) and Sweet Tooth (2011), both on his own Gut String Records, the latter a quartet with Chris Byars, Peter Bernstein, and Joe Strasser that a JazzTimes-adjacent review praised for Miner's "rock-solid grooves and confident, melodic soloing"; Timeline (2019) and Dog House Blues (2020), continuing the Gut String run with regulars Chris Byars and Michael Kanan; and Invisibility (2025, Cellar Music Group), a tenor-sax-bass-drums trio with Chris Byars and Jason Tiemann that critics described as a genuine collective rather than a leader-and-sidemen session, built on Great American Songbook material Miner arranged himself. Alongside the leader catalog sit several genuine co-billed dates: Play Date (2012), a duo reunion with longtime friend Chris Bergson recorded at Miner's own Manhattan apartment, documenting a musical partnership that began at Birdland in 1996; Live At Mezzrow (2017) with pianist Spike Wilner and saxophonist Joel Frahm; and Cookin' In The Couve (2024) with pianist Ben Paterson and drummer Aaron Seeber. He is also a recorded member of Planet Jazz, the working sextet with Joe Magnarelli, Jerry Weldon, Peter Bernstein, and Spike Wilner captured on 2010's Live At Smalls.

Beyond performing, Miner teaches privately through the New School, City College of New York, and the TriBeCa Jazz Institute, passing on the same walking-bass fundamentals and gut-string tone concepts he discusses in his own instructional videos for Gut String Records' YouTube channel.

Miner's playing pairs a hard-swinging, rhythmically insistent bass line with a rich, dark tone — a combination reviewers trace directly to his split training under classical bassist Orin O'Brien and jazz bassist John Webber. He plays gut strings rather than the steel-core strings most modern jazz bassists favor, a deliberate throwback choice that thickens his sound and links him audibly to an earlier generation of bassists; he cites Tommy Williams, Bob Cranshaw, Ray Brown, Paul Chambers, Ron Carter, and Scott LaFaro among his influences. That combination of old-school tone and modern time-feel has made him equally comfortable in two different rooms: propping up a singer's phrasing behind Annie Ross or Jane Monheit, where restraint and harmonic support matter most, and stretching out as a soloist on his own hard-bop sessions, where reviewers have praised his "tasteful," "melodic" improvising as much as his time-keeping. As a bandleader and Gut String Records founder, he has also become a connector — pairing rising and veteran players from the Smalls/Mezzrow scene (Chris Byars, Michael Kanan, Joe Strasser, Spike Wilner) across two decades of self-released dates.