&#; -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
&#;Miller led one of the most popular and best-remembered dance bands of the swing era. In his lifetime he was seen as an intense, ambitious perfectionist, and his success was built on the precise playing of carefully crafted arrangements, rather than propulsive swing or fine jazz solo improvisation (his only important jazz soloist was Bobby Hackett). He was particularly noted for the device of doubling a melody on saxophone with a clarinet an octave higher. His arrangements were seamless and rich. Paradoxically, however, although he had many hits with sentimental ballads performed by such singers as Ray Eberle and Marion Hutton, it was his swinging riff tunes, for example In the Mood and Tuxedo Junction, which became. In he published Glenn Miller's Method for Orchestral Arranging.&#;
- Charles De Ledesma, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
The Glenn Miller Years II
July
Jazzletter
Gene Lees
&#;The Pollack band was booked to play at the Little Club on 44th Street in New York, and opened there in March Bud Freeman years later recalled that the band's personnel at that time included himself, Gil Rodin, and
By the Fall of &#;
&#;the Glenn Miller Orchestra was the nation’s hottest attraction.
“Tuxedo Junction” and “A String of Pearls” reached No. 1 on the top-sellers chart, and Miller was awarded the first-ever gold record in for selling more than one million copies of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”
With the onset of World War II, Miller, at 37, was determined to take part in the war effort. Entering the Army in October , he molded the nation’s most popular service band. That U.S. Air Force Band went to England in the summer of , entertaining troops at 71 concerts in five months. On the afternoon of December 15, while flying from the south of England to newly liberated Paris to lead a concert to be broadcast on Christmas, the small plane carrying Major Glenn Miller disappeared over the English Channel, ending a brilliant and influential career in American popular music.
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