Glenn Miller
March 1, 1904-December 14, 1944
Bandleader, trombonist

    Milking a cow is how the great big band leader Glenn Miller began his musical career. Using the money he earned by milking the cows, by age 13 he was able to buy himself a trombone. During his youth, he lived in several states, including Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Colorado. By 1920, when he was just sixteen years old, he was playing trombone in dance bands. He enjoyed playing in several different bands and became fairly well known, but he decided that he wanted his own band.

    Miller formed his first band in 1937, using his musical ability and imagination, plus his confidence and business skills. He had a band for only eight years, and it was his own stubbornness that kept them together for even that long. As George Simon stated in his book The Big Bands, the band was "put together by a man who…knew better than any other leader exactly what he wanted and how to go about getting it."
The first two years of the band were very rough. The members of the band in March of 1937 included tenor sax Johnny Harell, trumpets Charlie Spivak, Sterling Bose, and Manny Klien, and clarinet Hal McIntyre. The rhythm section included piano Howard Smith and guitar Dick McDonough.

    Miller always strived for perfection in his band. They would have rehearsals every day and Miller was very patient, he would play a phrase on his trombone just how he wanted it, until it was played correctly. He made many changes in the membership, especially in those rough first two years, he had trouble particularly with the drummer's spot. On October 12, 1937 Miller wrote, "We are getting a new drummer (thank God), about two hundred and fifty pounds of solid rhythm, I hope."

    Because of the low success of that time, Miller couldn't afford the extreme top musicians. Once, using the best musicians he could find, he recorded six songs in three hours, but with his new group it took five hours for just two songs.

    He continued replacing and improving. He brought in clarinet player Irving "Faz" Fazola in late 1937, in hopes of improving, but the band continued to fail. Band morale was declining. It seemed as if everyone was against them. At one gig in New Jersey, Miller told the lighting man that he had one song which would start with the brass playing the first few bars around one microphone, and the rest of the band would come in later. He wanted the spotlight to be put on the brass at the beginning, and to bring up full stage lights when the rest of the band came in. However, that night, the song started, but the light came on the reed section, who were just standing there, confused, and waiting for their parts.

    By December, morale was the lowest ever. "One [trumpeter] could not get to sleep at night until he'd had so much to drink that he would roll off his bed and sleep on the floor." One member wrecked Glenn's car, and other cars broke down. Probably the worst tragedy for the band was that of the drummer Maurice Purtill leaving to play in New York. In January of 1938, he decided that the band wasn't working, and they broke up.
The better musicians left and easily found jobs with other bands. Then Miller found that he wanted to try again, and reformed the band in March, 1938. His new band used only four of the original members, alto sax Hal McIntyre, MacGreggor on piano, bass player Robby Bundoc, and trumpet Bob Price. He somehow found enough musicians out there to fill the rest of the seats.

    Once together again, they started playing at the Paradise Restaurant. But they were not exactly happy with it. The dull arrangements left them tired, which made their radio broadcasts become tired and uninspiring as well. But they must not have sounded too bad, for on March 1, 1939, Glenn was informed that his band was selected to play at the Glen Island Casino. This was a very high reward for the struggling band, because "being chosen to play Glen Island was as important to a band's success as…appearances on Ed Sullivan's TV show would be to a singing group of the sixties." Miller was surprised, because his selection was based on the performances at Paradise Restaurant, which he was not exactly proud of.

    After this breakthrough, he started putting a lot more time into his band. He revived the guitar spot, and added a trumpet and trombone, making his the first band with an eight person brass section. Other members he added were clarinetist Wilbur Schwartz, trumpet Johnny Austin, drummer Bob Spangler, and tenor saxophone Gordon "Tex" Beneke. He also added to his arrangements, using several by Bill Finegan.
The Glen Island Casino gave the band its much-needed success, after quitting there in late 1939, the band started to break records. They set the Capitol Theatre record of $22,000, and the Hippodrome record of $19,000, amazing sums in that time. They played on stages with Benny Goodman, Fred Waring, and Paul Whiteman, other great musicians already recognized by the public.

    By 1940, the band was so successful that it could not fill all the dates offered. They had an extremely busy schedule, playing three radio shows a week, with rehearsals, five hours a night at the hotel, and four shows a day at the Paramount. In addition, that summer they recorded more than thirty songs.
Even with all the success, he continued to make improvements in his staff. In September, he hired a new bass player, Herman Alpert. Two trumpet replacements were Ray Anthony and Billy May, with lead trumpet. Then in 1941, he hired the cornet player Bobby Hackett, but fans were shocked when he wasn't in the brass section, but on guitar, because of recent dental surgery made it impossible to play the trumpet for a while. He also hired the Modernaires, a vocal quartet consisting of Chuck Goldstien, Hal Dickinson, Ralph Brewster, and Bill Conway. They sang in such songs as "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and in the band's first of two movies, "Sun Valley Serenade."

    Many of the songs they recorded together have interesting histories. For example, the group's theme song, "Moonlight Serenade" began in 1935 when Miller was working on a mathematical composition exercise. It never had a single set of lyrics for very long. Eddie Herman wrote the words, titling the song "Now I Lay Me Down to Weep." This was too sad for a theme song, Another set was written by George Simon, titled "Gone With the Dawn," but it was also too depressing for them to use as a theme. Then Mitchell Parish wrote the final lyrics, which became "Moonlight Serenade," and was recorded on the back side of the "Sunrise Serenade" record.

    One of the most well remembered songs was "In the Mood". It was written by Joe Garland, but it lasted eight minutes, too long to record. Miller took the song and made his own arrangement to fit on one side of a record. It strongly demonstrates a typical Miller Band sound, a certain riff repeated and fading away, then suddenly coming back fortissimo, a device he used to rouse a crowd.
They had to have music in their movies, so Harry Warren was assigned to write some. He stated, "All I know is that we had to write something for Glenn Miller for his first movie, Sun Valley Serenade, so we sat down and wrote Chattanooga Choo-Choo." For a song just written for a movie, it sold over one million copies, and Miller was presented with "a gold plated copy of his record, and this became the prototype of the Gold Record now awarded by the Record Industry Association of America for all million sellers."
After eight years of leading a band, as many bands do, Miller developed his own distinct sound. "The miller 'sound' was a clarinet lead, with a tenor sax - or saxes - playing the same melody one octave lower than the clarinet." Other trademarks of his band included the steady brass section, consisting of four trumpets and four trombones.

    On September 27, 1942, Glenn Miller decided break up his band and go to serve his country in the war. After a short battle with pneumonia, he became a captain, later promoted to major, in the Air Force. Once in the Air Force, he wanted to assemble service bands to play marches and entertain troops, but found the process difficult because of strict military politics. Eventually he was assigned to the Army Air Forces Technical Training, where he did organize a band. He acquired other military musicians whom were sent to Yale University. Some of them were some of the bands original members. Drummer Ray McKinley, trumpet Zeke Zachary, bass Albert, and trombone Jim Priddy as well as arranger Jerry Gray all returned to Miller's Band. There at Yale University, the band played some swing arrangements of common marches: "The St. Louis Blues March," and the "Blues in the Night March." During a concert in a park in the height of WWII, a German V-1 bomb buzzed overhead. As the audience ducked for cover, Miller's band played on.

    Miller wanted the band to go overseas, where the action was, and the refusal with other military stress began to make him more irritable. Once, he ordered his band to shave their moustaches, so they would look like real soldiers. They did not like this, some of them had moustaches for many years, and it made the wind instrument players change their technique.

    Glenn was very stubborn. He insisted on going overseas, and to avoid any objections, he applied for transfer using his full name, Alton Glenn Miller. Only then his application was accepted. In the spring of 1944, the army sent a group of about sixty, consisting of musicians, arrangers, producers, and announcers, to London, England. Soon after arriving in London, Glenn insisted on moving his whole band the nearby town of Bedford, because he wanted to avoid any bombs that were threatening many large cities. The tired musicians did not want to move, but he insisted. The morning after they arrived in Bedford, a bomb scored a direct hit with the location where they were staying.
Once they settled down a little, the band began to play familiar tunes for the soldiers who needed a taste of home. The band would have preferred to learn and play new songs, just for some variety in the identical gigs. But Glenn knew what the soldiers wanted to hear, and played it for them.
On December 15, 1944, Glenn Miller left in a plane for Paris, flying over the English Channel, and was never seen again. This was the night before a performance that would be broadcast worldwide, in which a version of "Little Brown Jug" was to be played, a Christmas present to Miller's wife. The exact cause of the plane's disappearance is still unknown to this day. There are now three theories about how he died. The most accepted one states that the plane crashed due to poor weather conditions. Another one thinks that the plane was shot down by another plane of unknown identity flying higher than Miller's. The third is that he arrived in Paris, only to die of a heart attack, and the media made up the story of the plane crash to keep war morale up. We will never know for sure.

    After his death, "Tex Beneke, his first chair sax-man and vocalist took over the band…Miller had finally became a musical success, yet his orchestra lasted a scant 4 ½ years." Miller was just forty years old at the time of his death, which ended all the grand plans he was making for his band after the war. As said by George Simon in The Big Bands, "Of all the outstanding popular dance bands, the one that evokes the most memories of how wonderfully romantic it was, the one whose music people most want to hear over and over, is the band of the late Glenn Miller."

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