30 HOT LICKS WITH VANILLA: GLENN MILLER

Glenn Miller occupies a unique position in the history of pop. He made music that was, and remains, so popular that it is almost never explored by critics (the jazz critic’s default position is that it isn’t jazz, so why bother?). The public never had any issue with it, though, and the roll call of Miller’s wartime hits – ‘In the Mood’, ‘Moonlight Serenade’, ‘Little Brown Jug’, ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’, ‘A String of Pearls’, ‘Tuxedo Junction’, ‘American Patrol’ – is as familiar as the Beatles’ singles.

Miller remains a romantic figure. This has nothing to do with his slightly starched appearance, like Harold Lloyd without the jokes, his head bent slightly forward as if he were peering into a microscope. It has a lot to do with the evocative sound of ‘Moonlight Serenade’, and plenty with his disappearance in thick fog over the English Channel, aged forty, just before Christmas 1944. The combination of a forward-thinking sound with a withdrawn persona and opaque image foreshadows some of the greatest modern pop heroes, the likes of David Bowie and Scott Walker.

‘In the half dozen or so conversations I had with him, I found Miller perfectly civil but staggeringly uninformed, and seemingly indifferent to practically everything,’ wrote George Frazier in his ‘Sweet and Low Down’ column for the Boston Herald. Indifferent to everything, that was, ‘except his music’. He played golf, apparently, and toyed with the stock market, occasionally. The 1954 movie The Glenn Miller Story, starring James Stewart, is an object lesson in making a little go a long way. ‘I have this sound in my head,’ says Stewart, many times, attempting to create mystique around a man who was undoubtedly devoted to his wife and adopted kids, but otherwise barely there.

None of this mattered to the millions who heard him on their radios playing at New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania as winter set in; or on the BBC Light Programme, sounding impossibly American and futuristic; or on jukeboxes (Miller’s career was made by jukeboxes) in drug stores and bars across America; or on portable gramophones, if you had the means, whistling along to ‘In the Mood’ as you opened a bottle of brown ale, while gazing across the tall grass blowing in the breeze on the South Downs. What his music sounded like was the world pulling together. Details were irrelevant; Glenn Miller’s music sounded like a possible, and then a probable, future.

He loved jazz and had played fine trombone for Red Nichols’s band, but he had a commercial heart and mathematical mind. He was obsessed in a scientific way with music, with how it could and should sound. Even the sound of his own name could be improved. Born in Clarinda, Iowa, he was originally Alton Glenn Miller, but he ‘couldn’t stand the name Alton. I can still hear my mother calling me from across the field. “Alton!” It was never ‘Awlton.’ “Alton!” she would call. “ALTON! Come on home!” I just hated the sound of that name. That’s why I always used “Glenn” instead.’

Miller put himself through the University of Colorado by playing in a college band for two years. He took no music lessons; instead, he would stay up at night reading and re-reading Arthur Lange’s Arranging for the Modern Dance Orchestra, a 1926 book that was the big-band equivalent of Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day. A decade later, though, Miller was studying theory and arrangement with Professor Joseph Schillinger; one homework assignment turned out to be ‘Moonlight Serenade’. In no way was he instinctive – possibly one reason why most jazz histories pass up on him completely – but new sounds obsessed him, the most exciting, the most commercial, the most modern.

The saxophone had been in plenty of military and minstrel bands but was an alien instrument in New Orleans jazz. The general line of thinking, according to trumpeter Bunk Johnson, was that ‘it just runs up and down stairs with no place to go’. It would find a home in dance bands in the 1920s, who would play in spacious hotel rooms and needed its volume. With Fletcher Henderson laying out the blueprint, and Coleman Hawkins his chief architect, the big band used the saxophone to build its sound, tall and vast. By the time of the swing era, it bossed most reed sections.

The chief victim of the saxophone’s rise was the clarinet. There were notable exceptions: the technique, virtuosity and New Orleans-influenced ornamentation of Benny Goodman’s sound made him possibly the greatest clarinet player ever; and while Artie Shaw was self-taught, more of a melodist, his playing betrayed his suave smoothness (check out his sinuous solo on ‘Frenesi’). Maybe more significant than either Goodman’s or Shaw’s clarinet-playing, though, was Miller’s use of the saxophone. Sitting on top of his saxophone section, the clarinet was whipped cream on hot chocolate, luxurious, and while out of step with most of the bands around them, this sound defined the early 1940s. The band sounded like a humming engine, like a generator, very urban and machine-age.

This was a sound Miller had discovered while working for Ray Noble, the British bandleader who had crossed the Atlantic after his success with Al Bowlly. Noble had asked Miller to form a group for him to lead at the Rainbow Room, New York. Initially, Miller used Noble’s trumpeter, Peewee Erwin, who played lead trumpet forcefully, an octave above the lead tenor saxophone. Erwin left just after Miller put Noble’s small group together, and his replacement was weak. Miller decided to substitute the trumpet with a high clarinet lead. Noble was apparently unimpressed and used the sound only occasionally, but Miller took it and ran with it when he formed his own band in 1937.

The reeds were played with vibrato and had to be super-tight, creating a heat-haze effect.^I Melody, above all else, was king. Miller incorporated melodic riffs – motorised and propulsive on ‘In the Mood’, gently throbbing on ‘A String of Pearls’ – played again and again with a rhythmic monotony, which allowed little room for soloing but gave the sound a hypnotic aspect. He disguised the repetition with a smooth sheen; melodic hooks would rise and fall, then conclude with a flourish. Miller understood pop.

For two years, the shimmering Miller sound was barely viable, with the band once earning itself a feeble $200 for an eight-hour performance at the Playland Casino in Rye, New York. Some players turned out to be drinkers or forgot to wear a handkerchief in their breast pocket – sackable offences to Miller’s mathematically precise mind. At one point in 1938 he broke up the whole band and started from scratch. He hired two teenage singers, Ray Eberle and Marion Hutton, both born and raised in the Jazz Age, but it made little difference. Someone must have noticed Miller’s band, though, as in 1939 they were booked to play a stint at Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook Ballroom in New Jersey. This meant ten broadcasts a week for NBC, and national exposure. That summer they were resident at the prestigious Glen Island Casino, meaning more broadcasts, more exposure; the pumping ‘Little Brown Jug’ was released as the Glen Island residency began, which sealed the deal.^II By 1940 the Glenn Miller Orchestra was playing a hundred hours a week and recording a hundred songs a year. Not all were good, but its strike rate was incredibly high.

Miller always looked professorial, his eyebrows raised as if to say, ‘I’m in charge.’ A mortar board and gown would have suited him well. But while his biopic makes him seem dull, mono-minded beyond belief, the musicians who worked with him early on remember he had a sharp sense of humour. In 1936 he wrote a song for Tommy Dorsey’s band called ‘Annie’s Cousin Fannie’, which was sung by Kay Weber (one of the earliest big-band female singers) and was risqué enough to get Dorsey and Weber’s prom show in Stanford called off by the dean. Gil Rodin was the saxophonist in Ben Pollack’s band, which Miller effectively ran: ‘I remember Glenn had an attack of appendicitis. We tried to cure it with lots of orange juice and gin, but it didn’t work, and finally one night I rushed him to the hospital for an operation. While Glenn was recuperating back in the apartment, we would have some free-for-alls among the musicians, who’d come in to try to make Glenn laugh so his scar would hurt.’

Miller was a shrewd judge, and some of his bit-part players were startlingly good choices. In 1939 sixteen-year-old Kay Starr briefly replaced the unwell Marion Hutton; her recordings with Miller that year included the cutesy ‘Baby Me’ and ‘Love with a Capital You’, but her rambunctious, older-sister voice would give her a string of major hits in the 1950s (‘Comes A-Long A-Love’, ‘Side by Side’, ‘Rock and Roll Waltz’). Billy May was a trumpeter and an arranger for Miller’s civilian band when he was just twenty-three, before becoming a much-coveted arranger and orchestra leader after that band broke up, and post-war going on to work with Frank Sinatra (including the career highlight Come Fly with Me), Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney and Anita O’Day. Trombonist Paul Tanner went on to produce experimental work with the theremin and played on the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’.

The war made Miller bigger still. Not because of desperate things like ‘The Booglie Wooglie Piggy’, with Miller’s Modernaires vocal group harmonising on the oinks, or the many sides he cut with brilliantine-voiced Ray Eberle, but because at the age of thirty-eight – after a decade of arranging and learning his craft – he asked to ‘be placed in charge of a modernised Army band’, entertaining the Allied forces with something more modern than Sousa marches. ‘All members of the Miller band were handpicked,’ said Bernie Privin, previously a trumpeter with Artie Shaw. ‘One did not apply for the job, so to speak. Which was very flattering, I must say. From the start it was a marvellous orchestra, and very well received. It was a marvellous experience, really.’

Miller with his peaked army hat is the first image of him that comes to mind, which is a shame, as it squashes his very real links to the future. Those riffs without solos, which bored jazzers, thrilled dancers and prepared them for the purely rhythmic music of the late twentieth century that began with R&B, continued through rock ’n’ roll and would find its purest form in house music. More specifically, Miller’s 1939 hit ‘The Little Man Who Wasn’t There’ (‘Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there’) has been cited by Bowie scholar Chris O’Leary as the root of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, and maybe The Man Who Fell to Earth. Miller must have felt like he was the man who owned the musical world of 1943.

As Captain Glenn Miller, he put together the Army Air Force Band and made some of his absolute best recordings: keeping the old brass reasonably happy, while frowning a little at this young people’s music, he did a swing arrangement of W. C. Handy’s ‘St Louis Blues March’; ‘My Buddy’ had a similar glacial feel to Claude Thornhill’s band, with an intimate, coddling sound, blanket-muffled and insulated against the cold outside; and at the other extreme was the thrilling, breakneck ‘Mission to Moscow’, which had been arranged for Miller by his pianist Mel Powell, who went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning avant-garde classical composer.^III

On the back of umpteen number ones, in 1941 Hollywood called. The silver screen revealed his quiet, thorough confidence and studied insolence to everybody, characteristics more associated with high clergy than jazz players. In one of his Hollywood vehicles, Sun Valley Serenade, Miller’s permanent quarter-smile was undercut by his stentorian, monotone delivery, which gave the impression he had hearing problems. Films aside, the armed forces also gave him his own radio show, beautifully called I Sustain the Wings, which broadcast from Manhattan. Now an international name, he had permission to take the Army Air Force Band to Britain in the summer of 1944, where they gave an astonishing eight hundred performances.

The musicians in the flesh… Major Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band. People couldn’t believe it. To British fans, they were like messengers from another planet. American popular musicians had not played in the UK since the early 1930s, thanks to rows between the US’s and UK’s musicians’ unions. The US Navy Band, led by Sam Donohue, was apparently the musicians’ favourite. But there were more of Miller’s men, heard by more people, and what’s more, Miller stayed in Britain longer. They were loved. British bandleader Joe Loss reckoned that ‘the only other time in my life I’d received such a thrill was in the early thirties, when I heard the Duke Ellington orchestra at the London Palladium. This magnificent orchestra… he [Miller] had a terrifically large string section, must have been fifty or sixty of them. So you’ve got every type of music, the lush sound of the strings, and you had the immaculate playing of the Miller music.’ The effect was immediate and lasting. People were deeply impressed.

Miller had arrived in June, and by mid-December he was gone. He disappeared just after Paris had been liberated. Bernie Privin: ‘We were all poised for take-off in Bedford. Our pilots wouldn’t rev the engines; they weren’t going anywhere. There was a hundred-foot ceiling – fog and rain and so forth. Major Miller elected to go in his one-engine plane, a pleasure plane. I remember waving goodbye as if it were yesterday. We left the next day and the sun was shining. It was beautiful.’

A lot of jazz history reads like romantic fiction. It comes down heavily on the dance-band era, while dabbing lavender around the sainted Louis and Bix. The combination of Miller’s own romantic legend, combined with the critical jazz view, can obscure his importance as both the biggest star of his day and a progenitor of modern pop. His sound was futurist and prescient. Glenn Miller doesn’t need jazz history on his side; he left his music frozen in time, like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain. It is as permanent as stone.

1. I. Prototypes of the Miller reed sound can be heard in snatches of Fletcher Henderson’s 1934 recordings ‘Wrappin’ It Up’, ‘Liza’ and ‘Hot and Anxious’, which provided the blueprint for ‘In the Mood’’s riff.
2. II. Originally a drinking song from the 1860s, in the 1950s it would be given a puerile lyric by the usually wonderful New Orleans writer Dave Bartholomew. As ‘My Ding-a-Ling’, it would give Chuck Berry a transatlantic number one in 1972.
3. III. Born Melvin D. Epstein, Powell is a fascinating character. Talking to The New Yorker’s jazz critic Whitney Balliett in the 1980s, he said, ‘I had done what I felt I had to do in jazz. I had decided it did not hold the deepest interest for me musically. And I had decided that it was a young man’s music, even a black music. Also, the endless repetition of material in the Goodman band – playing the same tunes day after day and night after night – got to me. That repetition tended to kill spontaneity, which is the heart of jazz and which can give a lifetime’s nourishment.’ Uniquely, he won DownBeat’s Jazz Pianist of the Year award in 1945 and a Pulitzer for ‘Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra’ in 1990.