Trombonist and bandleader, born in Clarinda, Iowa, USA. He studied at Colorado, joined the Ben Pollack Band before completing his studies, then moved to New York City in 1928, where he worked as a freelance musician and arranger. From 1937 he led a succession of popular dance orchestras, and joined the US Army Air Force in 1942, forming the US Air Force band to entertain the troops. He achieved a distinctive sound with a saxophoneclarinet combination, his many successes including Moonlight Serenade (his theme song), Little Brown Jug, and In the Mood (1939). While the band was stationed in Europe, he was a passenger in a small aircraft lost without trace over the English Channel. Several theories have been proposed for the disappearance, such as bad weather, but records have suggested that his aircraft may have been hit by bombs jettisoned over the Channel by Allied bombers returning from a mission aborted through bad weather. The big band sound he created has continued to be performed with great popularity since his death, and the film The Glenn Miller Story (1953) has kept his memory alive.
| Glenn Miller | ||
|---|---|---|
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Major Glenn Miller |
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| Background information | ||
| Birth name | Alton Glenn Miller | |
| Born |
March 1, 1904 Clarinda, Iowa, USA |
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| Died | circa December 15, 1944 | |
| Genre(s) | Jazz, Big band | |
| Occupation(s) | Bandleader | |
| Years active | 1923–1944 | |
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Associated acts |
Glenn Miller Orchestra | |
Alton Glenn Miller (March 1, 1904–circa December 15, 1944), born in Clarinda, Iowa, was an American jazz musician and bandleader in the swing era.
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 phone number of his New York hotel residence) — have remained familiar, even to generations born decades after Miller disappeared.
Life and career
Miller's family moved to North Platte, Nebraska during his childhood, and he started his musical career when his father brought home a mandolin.
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 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."
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. During his stint with Pollack, Miller had the opportunity to write several musical arrangements of his own. 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.
Discouraged, Miller returned to New York. With this sound, the Miller band that became the most popular was born in 1938.
The new Miller band immediately attracted large audiences to their concerts and records. Beginning in June 1938, Miller dominated the top spot on 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. "Tuxedo Junction" took over, keeping Miller at number one into the summer. On February 10, 1942, RCA Victor presented Miller with the first ever gold record for "Chattanooga Choo Choo". 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. 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 best musicians to ad lib.
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.
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 as the branch's band director. He instead 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. 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. Miller felt it was important that the band be as close as possible to the fighting troops.
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. Miller's disappearance remains a mystery; Wolfe, I Kept My Word: The Personal Promise Between a World War II Army Private and His Captain about What Really Happened to Glenn Miller, alleges that the author received secret information confirming that Miller was killed by friendly fire. A third theory has also gained some recent credibility based on observations from his younger brother Herb Miller. Both of these latter theories overlook the fact that Miller wasn't alone on the flight; 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 complained that at many of the concerts the band he lead appeared at, more than a few people confided into him what "really" happened to Glenn Miller. [Buddy DeFranco to George Simon, Glenn Miller and his Orchestra, p.446]
Jazz critic Gary Giddins has said that Miller's bitterness and aloofness with employees was probably a result of the many years he endured trying to build a successful band. 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 & 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.
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. (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. 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. 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 Kay Starr became one of the most popular singers of the 1950s, she got her start with Glenn Miller in 1939 recording two sides, "Baby Me" and "Love With A Capitol 'You'".
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. 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. 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 1950s, 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. Every year Clarinda, Iowa, Glenn Miller's birthplace, runs a Glenn Miller festival. Virtually the entire output of Chesterfield programs Glenn Miller did between 1939 and 1942 were recorded by the Glenn Miller organization on acetate discs. 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. other writings have cited Miller himself suggesting he had taken his trademark sound as far as he could take it without becoming completely sterile. 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.
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