| B i o g r a p h y |
Alton Glenn Miller
(March 1, 1904 — presumably December 15, 1944), was an American
jazz musician and bandleader in the swing era. He was one of the
best-selling recording artists from 1939 to 1942, leading one of the
best known "Big Bands". Miller's signature recordings include, "In the
Mood", "Tuxedo Junction", "Chattanooga Choo Choo", "Moonlight
Serenade", "Little Brown Jug", and "Pennsylvania 6-5000". While
traveling to entertain U.S. troops in France during World War II,
Miller's plane disappeared in bad weather. His body was never found.
Miller's recordings are still familiar refrains, even to generations
born decades after Miller disappeared.
Glenn Miller was born in Clarinda, Iowa on March 1, 1904. In 1915, Miller's family moved to Grant City, Missouri where he went to grade school. Around this time, Miller was given his first trombone and then played in the town band. In 1918, the Miller family moved again, this time to Fort Morgan, Colorado where Glenn went to high school. During his senior year, Miller became very interested in a new style of music called "dance band music". Miller enjoyed this music so much that he and some classmates decided to start their own band. By the time Miller graduated from high school in 1921, he had decided he wanted to become a professional musician. In 1923, Miller entered the University of Colorado where he joined Sigma Nu Fraternity, 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, who is credited with helping Miller create the "Miller sound", and under whose tutelage he himself composed what became his signature theme, "Moonlight Serenade." 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. 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. In the mid-1930s, Miller also worked as a trombonist and arranger in The Dorsey Brothers ill-fated co-led orchestra. In 1935, 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. Members of the Noble band included future bandleader Claude Thornhill, Bud Freeman and Charlie Spivak. Glenn Miller compiled several musical arrangements before forming his first band in 1937. 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'."
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, with three other saxophones
harmonized within a single octave. With this new sound combination, the
Miller band found success. Miller 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, Clyde Hurley, Ernie
Caceres, Ray Anthony, Hal McIntyre, and Bobby Hackett were some of the
musicians in the band. Ray Eberle, Marion Hutton, Skip Nelson, Paula
Kelly, Dorothy Claire, and The Modernaires were the seven singers. In
September 1938, the Miller band began making recordings for the RCA
Victor Bluebird Records subsidiary. In the spring of 1939, the band's
fortunes improved with a date at the Meadowbrook Ballroom in Cedar
Grove, New Jersey, 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. In 1939, Time magazine noted: "Of the twelve
to 24 discs in each of today's 300,000 U.S. jukeboxes, from two to six
are usually Glenn Miller's." There were record-breaking recordings such
as "Tuxedo Junction", which sold 115,000 copies in the first week.
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. From 1939 to 1942, Miller's band was
featured three times a week during a broadcast for Chesterfield
cigarettes. On February 10, 1942, RCA Victor presented Miller with the
first gold record for "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". In 2004, Glenn Miller
orchestra bassist Herman "Trigger" Alpert explanied the band's success:
"Miller had America's music pulse, he knew what would please the
listeners." Although Miller had massive popularity, many jazz critics
of the time had their misgivings, believing that the band's endless
rehearsals and "letter-perfect playing" diminished excitement and
feeling from performances. They also felt that Miller's brand of swing
shifted popular music away from the "hot" jazz bands of Benny Goodman
and Count Basie towards commercial novelty instrumentals and vocal
numbers. Miller was often criticized for being too commercial. His
answer to the criticism was, "I don't want a jazz band". Many modern
jazz critics still harbor similar antipathy toward Miller. Miller
himself emphasized orchestrated arrangements over improvisation, but he
did leave a little room for his musicians to ad lib. This would be best
exemplified by Tex Beneke, who soloed often on songs like "Sunrise
Serenade," and "Falling Leaves". In an article written by Gary Giddins
for The New Yorker in 2004, Giddins felt that these early critics erred
in denigrating Glenn Miller's music, and that the popular opinion of
the time should hold greater sway. The article states: "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?" Miller and his band appeared
in two Hollywood films, 1941's, Sun Valley Serenade and 1942's
Orchestra Wives, the latter featuring future television legend Jackie
Gleason playing a part as the group's bassist. A stickler for the
truth, Miller insisted on a thoroughly believable script before he'd go
before Twentieth-Century Fox cameras. Miller also 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.
In
1942, at the peak of his civilian career, Miller decided he could
better serve those in uniform by joining the war effort. At 38 years
old, Miller was too old to be drafted, and first volunteered for the
Navy but was told that they didn’t need his services. Miller then
wrote to the Army’s Brigadier General Charles Young on August 12
1942. Miller persuaded the Army to accept him so he could in his own
words, "put a little more spring into the feet of our marching men and
a little more joy into their hearts and to be placed in charge of a
modernized army band." After being accepted in the Army, Glenn’s
civilian band played their last concert in Passaic, New Jersey on
September 27, 1942. 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 on October 29, 1943 at the Victor
studios in New York City. Miller's striking innovations and his
adaptations 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 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.'" In the end, the soldiers had a positive reaction to the new
music and the Army gave tacit approval to the changes. The orchestra
was first based at Yale University. 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. After one of the band's performances, General
"Jimmy" Doolittle told a then Captain Miller, "Next to a letter from
home, Captain Miller, your organization is the greatest morale builder
in the ETO (European Theater of Operations)." By February 1944, the
band consisted of thirty musicians. The dance band boasted several
members of his civilian orchestra, including chief arranger Jerry Gray,
alongside stars from other bands such as: Ray McKinley, 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 recording
sessions took place on September 16, 1944, at the EMI studios on Abbey
Road (renamed the Abbey Road Studios), and include Shore's version of
Stardust. These recordings are of special musical interest as they were
some of the final recordings of Miller's career.