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Glenn Miller

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Alton Glenn Miller (March 1, 1904 — presumably December 15, 1944), was an American jazz musician and bandleader in the swing era. He is widely recognized as one of the genre's best-selling performers from 1939 to 1942 and fronted one of the most well-known "Big Bands." During World War II, while traveling to entertain U.S. troops in France, his plane disappeared in bad weather. His body was never found.

Glenn Miller

Miller's signature recordings — including, among others, "In the Mood", "Tuxedo Junction", "Chattanooga Choo Choo", "Moonlight Serenade", "Sun Valley Jump", "String of Pearls", "Little Brown Jug", "Pennsylvania 6-5000" (named for the phone number of his New York hotel residence) — are still familiar refrains, even to generations born decades after Miller disappeared.

Early life and career

Glenn Miller was born in Clarinda, Iowa on March 1, 1904. [1] Later, his family moved to North Platte, Nebraska during his childhood, and he started his musical career when his father brought home a mandolin. As soon as possible, he traded the instrument for an old horn, which he practiced diligently.[2]

In 1923, Miller entered the University of Colorado where he joined Sigma Nu Fraternity[3], but spent most of his time away from school, attending auditions and playing any gigs he could get, most notably with Boyd Senter's band in Denver. He dropped out of school after failing three out of five classes one semester, and decided to concentrate on making a career as a professional musician. He later studied the Schillinger technique with Joseph Schillinger[4], who is credited with helping Miller create the "Miller sound" and under whose tutelage he himself composed what became his signature theme, "Moonlight Serenade."[5]

Sony/BMG's Glenn Miller website continues:

"[In 1926] Miller toured with several groups and landed a good spot in Ben Pollack's group in Los Angeles. During his stint with Pollack, Miller had the opportunity to write several musical arrangements of his own. In 1928, when the band arrived in New York City, he sent for and married his college sweetheart, Helen Burger. He was a member of Red Nichols’s orchestra in 1930 and, because of Nichols, played in the pit bands of two Broadway shows, Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy, his bandmates included Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa. The consensus there was that Miller was no more than an average trombonist." [6]

Despite this, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Miller managed to earn a living working as a freelance trombonist in several bands.

"In November of 1929 [...] an original vocalist named Red McKenzie hired Glenn to play on two records that are now considered to be jazz classics: 'Hello Nola' and 'One Hour'. The session is also historic for its integration of both black and white musicians in the studio. Besides Glenn were clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, guitarist Eddie Condon, drummer Gene Krupa and Coleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone. Glenn always felt that these two sides with 'The Mound City Blue Blowers' represented his best-recorded trombone work."[7]

In the mid nineteen-thirties Miller also worked as a trombonist and arranger in the Dorsey Brothers ill fated co led orchestra. "[Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey] were constantly squabbling, and the subject was always music." [Glenn Miller and His Orchestra 65-6] In nineteen-thirty-five he assembled an American orchestra for British bandleader Ray Noble [GMO 66], developing the arrangement of lead clarinet over four saxophones that eventually became the sonic keynote of his own big band. Members of the Noble band included future bandleader Claude Thornhill, Bud Freeman and Charlie Spivak. [Major Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force Band]

Glenn Miller compiled several musical arrangements before forming his first band in 1937. Jerry Jerome, Hal McIntyre, Sterling Bose, Dick McDonough and Irving Fazola [Major Glenn Miller] were some of the musicians in the band, along with singer Kathleen Lane[8]. The band failed to distinguish itself from the many others of the era and eventually broke up. Benny Goodman said in 1976, "In late 1937, before his band became popular, we were both playing in Dallas. Glenn was pretty dejected and came to see me. He asked, 'What do you do? How do you make it?' I said, 'I don't know, Glenn. You just stay with it.'" [Miller Mood][9] "A Blues Serenade", "Solo Hop", and "Moonlight on the Ganges" were some of their recordings for Columbia records. [GMO 68]

File:Glenn Miller 2.jpg
Glenn Miller playing a trombone in the late 1930s.

Success 1938-1942

Discouraged, Miller returned to New York. He realized that he needed to develop a unique sound, and decided to make the clarinet play a melodic line with a tenor saxophone on the same note, while three other saxophones harmonized. With this sound combination, the Miller band that became the most popular was born in 1938. He was not the first to try this style, but he was the most successful at refining it and making it key to almost his entire repertoire. After a shaky start, it made his new band a nationwide hit. Tex Beneke, Al Klink, Chummy MacGregor, Billy May, Johnny Best, Maurice Purtill, Wilbur Schwartz, Ernie Caceres, Bobby Hackett, [MS 362-363],Ray Anthony [MS 307-309], and Hal McIntyre [MS 86], were some of the musicians in the band. Ray Eberle, Marion Hutton [MS 59],Skip Nelson [MS 460-462], Paula Kelly [MS 299], Dorothy Claire [MS 265] and The Modernaires [MS 222] were at various times, the singers.

In September of 1938 the Miller band began making recordings for the RCA Victor Bluebird subsidiary. [GMO 143] In the spring of 1939, the band's fortunes improved with a date at the Meadowbrook ballroom and more dramatically at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, New York. With the Glen Island date the band began a huge rise in popularity. [GMO 170] Time magazine in 1939 noted: " Of the twelve to 24 discs in each of today's 300,000 U. S. juke boxes, from two to six are usually Glenn Miller's." [10] "There were record-breaking recordings, as well, such as 'Tuxedo Junction', which sold 115,000 copies in the first week."[www.glennmillerorchestra.com] 1939's huge success culminated with the Miller band in concert at Carnegie Hall on October 6, with Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman and Fred Waring also the main attractions. [MS 91]

From 1939 to 1942, his band was featured three times a week during a broadcast for Chesterfield cigarettes. [GMO 197,314] On February 10, 1942, RCA Victor presented Miller with the first gold record for "Chattanooga Choo Choo". [Glenn Miller: A Legendary Performer] In 2004 Glenn Miller orchestra bassist Herman "Trigger" Alpert exclaimed, "Miller had America's music pulse, he knew what would please the listeners."[11]

Along with the massive popular acclaim, many jazz critics of that time had misgivings. Many felt that the Miller band's endless rehearsals and "letter perfect playing" diminished any excitement and feeling from the band's performances. [GMO 241] They also felt that Miller's rise shifted popular music away from the "hot" bands of Benny Goodman and Count Basie. "In fact, Miller was often criticized [...] for being too-and here comes that dreaded word term-'commercial'. His answer, 'I don't want a jazz band.'" [Major Glenn Miller] Many modern jazz critics still harbor similar antipathy toward Miller. ["Stride and Swing"] Miller himself emphasized orchestrated arrangements over improvisation, but he did leave a little room for his musicians to ad lib. This would be best examplified by Tex Beneke, who soloed often ("Sunrise Serenade," [MS 58] "Falling Leaves" [MS 209]). Gary Giddins feels in an article for the New Yorker, that these early critics erred in denigrating Glenn Miller's music and that the popular opinion of the time should hold greater sway. "Miller exuded little warmth on or off the bandstand, but once the band struck up its theme, audiences were done for: throats clutched, eyes softened. Can any other record match 'Moonlight Serenade' for its ability to induce a Pavlovian slaver in so many for so long?" ["Stride and Swing"]

Miller and his band appeared in two Hollywood films, Sun Valley Serenade (1941) and Orchestra Wives (1942), the latter featuring future television legend Jackie Gleason as the group's fictitious bassist. [GMO 253,295] "A stickler for the truth, [Miller] insisted on a throughly believable script before he'd go before Twentieth-Century Fox cameras. And keen businessman that he was, he demanded that the band become an integral part of the story and not just be thrown into some inconsequential scene [...]. He had achieved star status and he was now demanding and getting star treatment." [GMO 253]

The Army Air Force Band 1942-1944

In 1942, Miller joined the United States Army Air Forces ["Stars Wore Stripes"] and was commissioned as a captain as well as being appointed as the branch's band director. He initially formed a large marching band that was to be the core of a network of service orchestras, but his attempts at modernizing military music were met with some resistance from tradition-minded career officers. An example is the arrangement of "St. Louis Blues March", combining blues and jazz with the traditional military march. This was recorded October 29, 1943 at the Victor studios in New York City. [The Best of Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force Band] "Miller's striking innovations and his adaptions [sic] of Sousa marches for the AAF band prompted Time magazine to claim that he had rankled traditionalists in the field of Army music and had desecrated the late, great march king. The magazine also criticized Miller's injection of casual enjoyment into the disciplined cadences of military music, stating that the Army was 'swinging its hips instead of its feet.'" ["Stripes"] In the end though, the soldiers had a positive reaction to the new music and the Army gave tacit approval to the changes. ["Stripes"]

Miller formed what was first known as the Band of the Training Command, a 24-piece dance band augmented by 21 string players chosen from a number of symphony orchestras. [citation needed] The dance band boasted several members of his civilian orchestra, including chief arranger Jerry Gray as well as stars from other bands such as Ray McKinley, Bobby Nichols, Hank Freeman, Peanuts Hucko and Mel Powell. [citation needed] Johnny Desmond and the Crew Chiefs were the singers, although recordings were also made with guest stars such as Bing Crosby, Irene Manning and Dinah Shore. [citation needed] The Dinah Shore sessions[12] include her version of Stardust and are of special musical interest as they were recorded in high fidelity and were intended as the band's first commercial releases, although they were not made public until the early 1990s.[citation needed]

The orchestra was first based at Yale University.[13] From mid-1943 to mid-1944 they made hundreds of live appearances, transcriptions, and "I Sustain the Wings" radio broadcasts for CBS and NBC. Miller felt it was important that the band be as close as possible to the fighting troops. In mid-1944 he had the group transferred to London, where they were renamed the American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force. While in the United Kingdom the band gave more than 800 performances to an estimated one million Allied servicemen.

On December 15, 1944, Miller, now a major, was scheduled to fly from the United Kingdom to Paris to play for the soldiers who had recently liberated Paris. His plane departed from RAF Twinwood Farm, Clapham, Bedfordshire, but disappeared over the English Channel and was never found. Miller's disappearance remains a mystery; neither his remains nor the wreckage of his plane (a single-engined Noorduyn Norseman UC-64, USAAF Tail Number 44-70285) were ever recovered from the water. (Clive Ward's discovery of a Noorduyn Norseman off the coast of Northern France in 1985 was unverifiable and contained no human remains.)[14]

There have been sixty years of theories about what happened to Glenn Miller. One theory holds that he landed safely, but died of a heart attack in a bordello in Paris [GMO 415]. Buddy DeFranco, one of the leaders of the post war Glenn Miller orchestra explained to George Simon, that at many of the concerts where he was leading the Glenn Miller band in the nineteen-seventies, more than a few people confided to him what "really" happened to Glenn Miller. "If I were to believe all those stories, there would have been about twelve thousand four hundred and fifty eight people there at the field in England seeing him off on that last flight!" [GMO 446].

It is now thought more than likely that Glenn Miller's plane was accidentally bombed by RAF bombers over The English Channel, after an abortive air raid on Germany and short on fuel dumping four thousand pounds of bombs in a safe drop zone to lighten the load. The logbooks of Royal Air Force pilot Fred Shaw record that a small mono engined plane was seen to spiral out of control and crash into the water.[15][16]

The Glenn Miller Story(1953) and Some Band Alumni

Glenn Miller's music is familiar to many born long after his death, especially from its use in a number of movies. James Stewart starred as Miller in 1953's The Glenn Miller Story, which portrayed many of his compositions and also took many liberties with his life story. For example, Marion Hutton, Paula Kelly, Tex Beneke and Ray Eberle are not mentioned at all.

Many of the Miller musicians went on to studio careers in Hollywood and New York after World War II. For example, Billy May, who became a much-coveted arranger and studio orchestra leader — and backed up singers like Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Anita O'Day, and Bing Crosby. Wilbur Schwartz[17], Herman "Trigger" Alpert[18], Johnny Best, and Ernie Caceres ["Body and Soul"] backed up many singers in the 1940s and 1950s. Coronetist Bobby Hackett soloed on "A String of Pearls" in 1941 with the Miller orchestra; his reputation only ascended in the years after.[19] Hackett's "wistful trumpet solos added a unique and essential touch to music by everyone from Glenn Miller to Jackie Gleason to Dizzy Gillespie." [20]Norman Leyden from the Army Air Force Band was a noted arranger in New York, who later composed arrangements for Sarah Vaughan, among other people. [21] [22] Johnny Desmond from the Army Air Force Band became a popular singer in the 1950s and starred on Broadway in the 1960s in "Funny Girl" with Barbra Streisand. [23] Kay Starr[24] became one of the most popular singers of the post-war period; she got her start with Glenn Miller in 1939 recording two sides, "Baby Me" and "Love With A Capitol 'You'". [The Complete Glenn Miller]

Ghost Bands 1946-2007

The Miller estate authorized an official Glenn Miller "ghost band" in 1946. This band was led by Tex Beneke and had a make up similar to the Army Air Force Band: it had a large string section. [GMO 437-39] By 1948, economics dictated that the string section be dropped. This ghost band played to very large audiences all across the U.S., including a few dates at the Hollywood Palladium,[25] where the original Miller band played in 1941 [GMO 258]. "Even after the war, when big bands began to lose their popularity, the Palladium still drew in a record 6,750 eager dancers to the 1947 opening night performance of Tex Beneke and the Glenn Miller Orchestra – an event enthusiastically covered by Life Magazine." [26]

What began as the "Glenn Miller Orchestra Under the Direction of Tex Beneke" finally became "The Tex Beneke Orchestra". This band recorded for RCA Victor, just as the original Miller band did. Beneke was struggling with how to expand the Miller sound and also how to achieve success under his own name. The Miller estate had to please the ballroom operators and the record producers at RCA Victor. By 1950, Beneke and the Miller estate parted ways. [GMO 439] The break was acrimonious and Beneke is not currently listed by the Miller estate as a former leader of the Glenn Miller orchestra.[www.glennmillerorchestra.com/former_leaders.html]

When Glenn Miller was alive, various bandleaders like Bob Chester imitated his style.[27] By the early 1950s, various bands were again copying the Miller style of clarinet led reeds and muted trumpets, notably Ralph Flanagan[28],Jerry Gray [29] and Ray Anthony[30]. This, coupled with the success of The Glenn Miller Story, led the Miller estate to ask Ray McKinley to lead a new ghost band. This 1956 band is the original version of the current ghost band that still tours today.[31]

Legacy

Glenn Miller's widow, Helen, died in 1966. [GMO 434] Herb Miller, Glenn Miller's brother, led his own band in the United States and England until the late 1980s.[32] In April 1992, at his daughter's request, a stone was placed in Memorial Section H, Number 464-A on Wilson Drive in Arlington National Cemetery[33] Every year Clarinda, Iowa, Glenn Miller's birthplace, runs a Glenn Miller festival. [34] In the United Kingdom, at Twinwood Airfield which is the last place Glenn Miller was seen alive, The International Glenn Miller Festival of Swing, Jazz & Jive is held annually every August bank-holiday. [35] In 2003, Miller posthumously received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award[36]. Recently, in July of 2006, the now adult children of Glenn Miller were in the news with a lawsuit they filed against Glenn Miller Productions in the Ninth Circuit Court.[37]

The entire output of Chesterfield programs Glenn Miller did between 1939 and 1942 were recorded by the Glenn Miller organization on acetate discs. [GMO 200-1] In the 1950s and afterwards, RCA distributed many of these on long playing albums and compact discs. [MS] Also, a sizable representation of the recording output by the band is almost always in circulation by RCA/BMG[38]and the successor labels to Columbia and Decca. Glenn Miller remains one of the most famous and recognizable names of the big band era of 1935 to 1945.

Works Cited

Flower, John. Moonlight Serenade: A Bio-discography. New Rochelle, NY., Arlington House. 1972.

"Glenn Miller." n.d. SonyBMG. 27 Dec., 2006. http://www.sonybmg.de/artists2.php?iA=4&artist=6763.

The Glenn Miller Story. Dir. Anthony Mann. Perf. James Stewart, June Allyson. Universal-International Pictures. 1953.

"Hollywood Palladium." n.d. Hollywood Palladium. 2 Jan., 2007. http://www.hollywoodpalladium.com/history.htm.

Miller, Glenn. The Best of the Army Air Force Band. RCA, 2001.

Miller, Glenn. Glenn Miller, A Legendary Performer. RCA, 1974.

Miller, Glenn. The Complete Glenn Miller, Vol.1, Bluebird/RCA, 1975.

Miller,Glenn. Major Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force Band, 1943-44. Bluebird/RCA, 1987.

"Music In The Miller Mood." n.d. George Spink. 27 Dec., 2006. http://www.tuxjunction.net/glennmiller.htm.

Simon, George.Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. New York, DaCapo. 1980.

Sinatra, Frank. "Body and Soul." Columbia, 1947.

"Stride and Swing: The Enduring Appeal of Fats Waller and Glenn Miller." 24 May, 2004. Gary Giddins. 27 Dec., 2006. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/articles/040531crmu_music.

"The World Famous Glenn Miller Orchestra". n.d. Glenn Miller Productions. 30 Dec., 2006. http://www.glennmillerorchestra.com.

"World War Two: The Stars Wore Stripes." April, 1990. Fort George G. Meade Museum. 6 January, 2007. http://www.ftmeade.army.mil/museum/Archive_Stars_Part%201b.htm

See also

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Glenn Miller.

Site about the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band

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