Glenn Miller

Glenn Miller (March 1, 1904–circa December 15, 1944) started life as Alton Glenn Miller in Clarinda, Iowa. Miller was an American jazz musician and bandleader in the swing era who was the genre's best-selling performer from 1939–1942 and the best-known of the "Big Bands.". After a very successful career, including many famous recordings, he disappeared in bad weather (some say "under mysterious circumstances") during World War II, while on a flight to entertain U.S. troops in France.

Miller's signature recordings — including, among others, "In the Mood", "Tuxedo Junction", "Chattanooga Choo Choo", "Moonlight Serenade", "Sun Valley Jump", "String of Pearls", and "Pennsylvania 6-5000" (named for the exchange of his New York hotel residence) — have remained familiar, even to generations born decades after their creator disappeared.

Life and career

Miller's family moved to North Platte, Nebraska during his boyhood, 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.

In 1923, Miller entered the University of Colorado where he joined Sigma Nu Fraternity, but spent most of his time there 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, who is credited with helping Miller create the "Miller sound" and under whose tutelage he himself composed what became his longtime theme, "Moonlight Serenade."

RCA/BMG's Glenn Miller website continues: (in 1926) "Miller toured with several groups landed) a good spot in Ben Pollack's group in Los Angeles. 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,^*" target="_blank" >his bandmates included Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa. The consensus there was that Miller was no more than an average trombonist^*

Despite this, during the 1930s, Miller earned a living working as a freelance trombonist in several bands. In 1934 he assembled an American orchestra for British bandleader Ray Noble, developing the arrangement of lead clarinet over four saxophones that eventually became the sonic keynote of his own big band.

He also compiled several musical arrangements before forming his first band in 1937.Jerry Jerome, Hal McIntyre, Charlie Spivak, Sterling Bose, and Irving Fazola were some of the musicians in the band. Kathleen Lane was the singer. The band failed to distinguish itself from the many others of the era, and broke up. “Peg O’ My Heart,” “Anytime, Any Day, Anywhere,” “Moonlight, Bay,” “I’m Sitting on Top The World,” “I Got Rhythm,” “Sleepy Time Gal,” “Community Swing,” “Time On My Hands” and “Silhouetted In The Moonlight” were some of their best recordings.

Discouraged, he returned to New York. Realizing that he needed a unique sound, he dedicated himself to finding it. After a lot of work, he decided to make the clarinet play a melodic line with a tenor saxophone on the same note, while three saxophones harmonized. With this sound, the Miller band that became the most popular was born in 1938. He was not the first to try that style, but he was the most successful at refining it and making it key to just about his entire repertoire, and it made his new band a hit and, in short enough order, the top selling big band in the country. Tex Beneke, Al Klink, Chummy MacGregor, Billy May, Johnny Best, Maurice Purtill, Wilbur Schwartz, Ernie Caceres, Ray Anthony, Clyde Hurley and Hal McIntyre, among others, were some of the musicians in the band. Ray Eberle, Marion Hutton and The Modernaires were the singers.

The new Miller band immediately attracted large audiences to their concerts and their records. Beginning in June 1938, Miller dominated the top spot on the various popular music charts for more than a year, with "In the Mood" holding the top spot for more than fifteen weeks at the beginning of 1940 and "Tuxedo Junction" taking over and keeping Miller at number one into the summer. From 1939 to 1942, his band was featured on a three times a week broadcast for Chesterfield cigarettes. On February 10, 1942, RCA Victor presented Miller with the first ever gold record for "Chattanooga Choo Choo". His other popular hits included "A String Of Pearls", "Moonlight Serenade", and "Pennsylvania 6-5000" (which was, and still is, the real telephone number of the Hotel Pennsylvania) in Manhattan. By RCA accounting, the Glenn Miller Band had 22 recordings reach number one on the charts.

Many jazz critics of that time felt that Miller's rise shifted popular music away from the "hot" bands of Benny Goodman and Count Basie. Miller himself emphasized orchestrated arrangements over improvisation, but he did leave a little room for his best musicians to improvise.

"Miller’s arrangements are inventive and refreshing. He never forgets the melodic line. He lets you recognize the tune." — New York Times, January 1940.

Miller and his band also 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.

Military service, disappearance, and personality

In 1942, Miller joined the United States Army Air Forces and was commissioned as a captain as well as being appointed Director of Bands. 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 resistance from tradition-minded career officers. He instead formed what was first known as the Band of the Training Command, an orchestra consisting of a large (twenty-four musicians) dance band augmented by twenty-one string players chosen from a number of symphony orchestras. The dance band included 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. 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. The Dinah Shore sessions include a charming 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.

The orchestra was first based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. From mid-1943 to mid-1944 they made hundreds of live appearances, transcriptions, and "I Sustain the Wings" radio broadcasts. Miller felt it was important that the band be as close as possible to the fighting troops so 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.

For many years, the only available recordings of this band were on a five-record set issued by RCA in the mid-1950s. Since the nineties however, RCA and various companies have issued high fidelity compact discs of music previously thought lost. This link shows what the Glenn Miller Army Air Force band sounded like: http://history.acusd.edu/gen/snd/glennmiller.html

On December 15, 1944, by this time with the rank of major, Miller was scheduled to fly from the UK to Paris to play for the soldiers who had recently liberated the city. 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; the fact that 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 Channel have led to many conspiracy theories over the years. He is considered to have died that day, aged forty. A popular theory holds that, in the foggy weather that bedeviled the Channel on that day, Miller's plane strayed into a "safe drop" zone and was bombed out of the air by Canadian Air Force bombers disposing of bombs that went unused during an aborted bombing run on German positions. Another theory holds that he landed safely, but died of a heart attack in a bordello ín Paris (source: George T. Simon: "Glenn Miller, Sein Leben, Seine Musik", Wien 1987). A third theory has also gained some recent credibility based on observations from both his biographer and his younger brother Herb Miller. Glenn had been a chain-smoker for much of his life and by late 1944 was suffering from severe weight loss and shortness of breath, leading to speculation that he was terminally ill, probably with lung cancer. This theory also holds that he landed safely, but died of his illnesses on December 16th. Both of these latter theories overlook the fact that Miller wasn't alone on the flight; there were two other officers onboard the aircraft when it disappeared. They also have never been found.

According to Leo Walker in his book The Big Band Almanac, few people knew Miller well. Two people who did were Don Haynes, Miller's manager, and George T. Simon, jazz critic and author of Glenn Miller & His Orchestra. Don Haynes told Walker that Miller was a reserved person, but extremely warm towards those near him. But other musicians who were associated with Miller thought differently. They all respected Miller, but described him as all business, generally cold, perhaps insecure, and a person who had a driving ambition to be successful. But they all agreed that Miller was a musical perfectionist. "Glenn had guts," said Simon in his book The Big Bands. "He could also spot phonies, whom he truly detested. If you were straight with Glenn, he'd give you at least the time of day. But if you weren't, he wouldn't even give you the time of night."

Legacy

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. (Benny Goodman and the Dorsey brothers, to be fair, suffered similar fates when films of their lives were made in the same decade.)

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. Also George Siravo from Miller's first band was a noted arranger who worked for Columbia in the late forties and early fifties and arranged songs for Doris Day and Sinatra. Wilbur Schwartz, Herman "Trigger" Alpert, Johnny Best, and Ernie Caceres backed up many singers in the fifties. Ray Anthony led his own extremely popular band during that same time period. Norman Leyden Sarah Vaughan, among other people. Johnny Desmond from the Army Air Force Band became a popular singer in the fifties and starred on Broadway in the 1960s in "Funny Girl" with Barbra Streisand [http://barbra-archives.com/MagazineArchives/sunday_news_1965_desmond.html#desmond" target="_blank" >^*

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. 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, where the original Miller band played in 1941. "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." ^* 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. The post-war Miller/Beneke band was heavily influenced by 1940s jump and R&B as evidenced by hits like "Hey Ba-Ba-Re-bop". 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. The break was acrimonious and Beneke is rarely mentioned by the Miller estate as ever leading the Glenn Miller orchestra. Six years later, after the success of The Glenn Miller Story, Ray McKinley was asked to lead a new ghost band; this is the original version of the current ghost band that still tours today.

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. Every year Clarinda, Iowa, Glenn Miller's birthplace, runs a Glenn Miller festival. ^* Glenn Miller remains one of the most famous and recognizable names of the big band era of 1935 to 1945.

New Sound?

Miller himself may have been pondering a change to his music before his death. Adding a string section to his military band was one hint; other writings have cited Miller himself suggesting he had taken his trademark sound as far as he could take it without becoming completely sterile. In particular the aforementioned Dinah Shore recordings display a very different arranging style with only a slight hint of the famous reed blend. His death left forever unanswered the question of where he might have taken his music after the war, particularly when postwar economics made most bands the size of Miller's nearly impossible to sustain.

On the other hand, a soundtrack album of his two films showed the pre-Army Miller band playing with a more full-blooded attack (abetted by the broad reverberation of the sound stages where they cut the soundtracks, including new and meatier versions of some of their most familiar material) than they were known to do on their original recordings; perhaps Miller might have developed a new sound from that vantage point.

Quotations

"A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality."
"I haven’t (got) a great jazz band and I don’t want one... A dozen colored bands have a beat better than mine."
"(The saxophone sound) was always intended to be an all-around combination; but when we do play a swing number, we expect and try to make it swing as much as possible."
"There is no rest, there must be no rest for a fellow when he is successful. He has got to keep right on going... And don’t think that I am the product of luck or breaks or anything like that. I have worked hard ever since I came out of the University of Colorado. I have played the trombone in so many bands, I can’t count them all."

Samples

Tuxedo Junction.ogg of "Tuxedo Junction" by Glenn Miller
Broadcast of Glenn Miller's Band during WWII
A Broadcast of many of his works in their full un-edited length.

External links

Bio and Pictures
http://nfo.net/usa/m3.html
http://www.parabrisas.com/d_millerg.php
http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/miller_glenn/bio.jhtml
The Glenn Miller Birthplace Society, organizing annual festivals
The Jack Million Band, Belgium, working band with authentic interpretation of Glenn Miller original arrangements
A WWII soldier's insight into the mysterious disappearance of Glenn Miller

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