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 during
World War II, while on a flight to entertain U.S. troops in France. His body was never found.
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.
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 [...](and landed) a good spot in
Ben Pollack's group in
Los Angeles. [...] (D)uring 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[...]." [
1]
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. This antipathy towards Glenn Miller from many jazz critics continues today. Miller himself emphasized orchestrated arrangements over improvisation, but he did leave a little room for his best musicians to improvise.
"[Glenn 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.
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; 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. (
Clive Ward's discovery of a
Noorduyn Norseman off the coast of Northern France in 1985 was unverifiable and contained no human remains.) This has 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 Ãn 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 aboard the aircraft when it disappeared. They also have never been found.
Jazz critic Gary Giddins has said that Miller's bitterness and cold personality to his employees was probably the result of the many years he endured trying to build a successful band during the Depression. 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. Close friend and jazz critic George Simon says in his book
The Big Bands says 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."
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 [
2] 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[
3] from the Army Air Force Band was a noted arranger in New York, who arranged for
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 [
4]
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 â€" an event enthusiastically covered by
Life Magazine." [
5]
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.
By the early nineteen fifties, various bands were copying the Miller style of clarinet led reeds and muted trumpets, notably
Ralph Flanagan,
Jerry Gray and
Ray Anthony. This, coupled 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.
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. [
6] Virtually the entire output of Chesterfield programs Glenn Miller did between 1939 and 1942 were recorded by the Glenn Miller organization on acetate discs. In the 1950s and afterwards, RCA distributed many of these on long playing albums and compact discs. Also, a sizable representation of the recording output by the band is almost always in circulation by RCA/BMG. Glenn Miller remains one of the most famous and recognizable names of the big band era of 1935 to 1945.
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.
*"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."
*
Download sample of "Tuxedo Junction" by Glenn Miller
*
Glenn Miller Radio Show (9 episodes from 1940)*
Broadcast of Glenn Miller's Band during WWII*
A Broadcast of many of his works in their full un-edited length.*
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*
BBC's Article on Glenn Miller[
7]
*
Glenn Miller Orchestra
