Information AboutGlenn Miller |
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 ." During World War II , while traveling to entertain U.S. troops in France , his plane Disappeared in bad weather. 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 ", " Little Brown Jug ", " Pennsylvania 6-5000 " (named for the phone number of New York's Hotel Pennsylvania, whose ballroom was Miller's primary venue) — are still familiar refrains, even to generations born decades after Miller disappeared. EARLY LIFE AND CAREER Glenn Miller was born in 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 Trombone , which he practised diligently. {Link without Title} In 1923, Miller entered the ." {Link without Title} Sony/BMG's Glenn Miller website continues: : 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. [http://www.sonybmg.de/artists2.php?iA=4&artist=6763] 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. [Twomey [http://www.jazzsight.com/jazzsightprofiles.html] In the mid-1930s Miller also worked as a trombonist and arranger in the Dorsey Brothers ill-fated co-led orchestra. " and Tommy Dorsey were constantly squabbling, and the subject was always music." 65-6 In 1935 he assembled an American orchestra for British bandleader Ray Noble 66 , developing the arrangement of lead Clarinet over four Saxophone s 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. [Albertson] Glenn Miller compiled several Musical Arrangement s 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.'" {Link without Title} SUCCESS FROM 1938 TO 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, with three other saxophones Harmonize d within a single octave. 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 , Clyde Hurley , Ernie Caceres , Ray Anthony , Hal McIntyre and Bobby Hackett , among others, 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 subsidiary. 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. 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." "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. 91 From 1939 to 1942, his band was featured three times a week during a broadcast for Chesterfield Cigarettes . 197,314 On February 10 , 1942 , RCA Victor presented Miller with the first Gold Record for "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". 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." [http://www.bigbandlibrary.com/glennmiller.html 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. 241 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. "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.'" [Albertson Many modern jazz critics still harbor similar antipathy toward Miller. 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 exemplified by Tex Beneke, who soloed often ("Sunrise Serenade," 58 "Falling Leaves" 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?" 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 playing a part as the group's bassist. (Gleason did not actually play bass in the movie; the bass was played on the soundtrack by regular Miller bassist Trigger Alpert.) 253,295 "A stickler for the truth, insisted on a thoroughly 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." 253 THE ARMY AIR FORCE BAND 1942-1944 outside the Corn Exchange in Bedford , where Miller played in World War 2.]] In 1942, Miller joined the United States Army Air Forces Wore Stripes" and was commissioned as a Captain as well as being appointed as the branch's band director. Miller jettisoned most of his civilian band's musical library. " the famous Miller sound exemplified in 'Moonlight Serenade' was only heard occasionally from the AEF [Allied Expeditionary Forces Band." 97 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. Best of Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force Band "Miller's striking innovations and his adaptions 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.'" ["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"] The orchestra was first based at 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 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 of 1944, the band consisted of thirty musicians. 41 The dance band boasted several members of his civilian orchestra, including chief arranger . They are of special musical interest as they were intended as the band's first commercial releases. 152-153 The British magazine ''Melody Maker'' in their September 23, 1944 issue said: " Dinah Shore recording session which lasted for over four hours-gave us an opportunity to witness the painstaking thoroughness and terrific attention to detail of American musicians and artistes, and very impressive it was too." 152-153 As of 1986 the songs from this session were yet to be issued on any label. 156 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 , 203-205 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.)[http://www.bigbands.org/millercrash.htm] There have been sixty years of theories about what happened to Glenn Miller. 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!" 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.[http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/filmnotes/glennmillerstory.html][http://www.mboss.force9.co.uk/twinwood/roth/index.htm] ''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 popular '' The Glenn Miller Story '', which featured many songs from the Glenn Miller songbook, but which 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 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 . {Link without Title} Kay Starr 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. 437-39 " orchestra's 'official' public debut was at the Capitol Theater on Broadway where it opened for a three week engagement [on January 24, 1946 ." 262 "The theater held three or four thousand people, I guess-it was sheer bedlam, an incredibly exciting thing to hear, Bob Ripley " 262 Ripley also says, "People would call out from the audience the Capitol Theater 'where's Glenn?' and it was apparent that a lot of people didn't even know he wasn't with us." 262 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 258 . Ben Ratliff in the June 6, 2000 edition of ''The New York Times'' noted, "In December 1947, even as the big band era faded, Tex Beneke and the Glenn Miller Orchestra played to a record-breaking crowd of 6,750 dancers at the Hollywood Palladium." By 1949 , economics dictated that the string section be dropped. 263 This band recorded for RCA Victor 263 , 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. What began as the "Glenn Miller Orchestra Under the Direction of Tex Beneke" finally became "The Tex Beneke Orchestra". By 1950 , Beneke and the Miller estate parted ways. 439 The break was acrimonious and Beneke is not currently listed by the Miller estate as a former leader of the Glenn Miller orchestra.[http://www.glennmillerorchestra.com/former_leaders.html] When Glenn Miller was alive, various bandleaders like Bob Chester imitated his style. By the early 1950s, various bands were again copying the Miller style of clarinet led reeds and muted trumpets, notably '', led the Miller estate to ask Ray McKinley to lead a new ghost band. [Butcher 263 This 1956 band is the original version of the current ghost band that still tours the United States today.[http://www.glennmillerorchestra.com/itinerary.html] The official Glenn Miller orchestra for the United States is currently under the direction of Larry O'Brien. The officially sanctioned Glenn Miller Orchestra for Europe has toured and recorded with great success since 1990 under the leadership of Wil Salden. LEGACY Glenn Miller's widow, Helen, died in 1966. 434 Herb Miller, Glenn Miller's brother, led his own band in the United States and England until the late 1980s. Herb's son, John [http://www.johnmillerorchestra.org.uk/cgi-bin/JohnMiller/index.html , continues the tradition leading a band playing mainly Glenn Miller style music. In April 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.[http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:8LoZTEArKRAJ:www.ca9.uscourts.gov/coa/newopinions.nsf/96058D191C528691882571AF007F7F09/%24file/0455874.pdf%3Fopenelement+glenn+miller+cmg+worldwide+lawsuit&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 The entire output of Chesterfield programs Glenn Miller did between 1939 and 1942 were recorded by the Glenn Miller organization on acetate discs. 200-1 In the to 1945 . WORKS CITED Albertson, Chris. Liner notes. ''Major Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force Band, 1943-1944.'' Bluebird/RCA, 1987. 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. ''The Complete Glenn Miller'', Vol.1, Bluebird/RCA, 1975. "Music In The Miller Mood." n.d. George Spink. 27 Dec., 2006. http://www.tuxjunction.net/glennmiller.htm. "New King" n.d. anon. 2 March, 2007. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,762896,00.html Simon, George.''Glenn Miller and His Orchestra''. New York, DaCapo. 1980. "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. Twomey, John. "Who was Glenn Miller?" October, 2003. http://www.jazzsight.com/jazzsightprofiles.html "World War Two: The Stars Wore Stripes." n.d. Fort George G. Meade Museum. 6 January, 2007. http://www.ftmeade.army.mil/museum/Archive_Stars_Part%201b.htm SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
Site about the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band
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