Crash Course Timeline, No. 42: Glenn Miller, the Sweetest (and Shortest) of the Bandleaders

With this chapter, we turn to the sweetest and, arguably, the squarest of the Big Band leaders. Also, one of the more polarizing ones:

“Miller discovered a popular formula from which he allowed little departure. A disproportionate ratio of nostalgia to substance keeps his music alive.”
- Doug Ramsey, Jazz Times website (1997; quoted in Wikipedia)

“Can any other record match 'Moonlight Serenade' for its ability to induce a Pavlovian slaver in so many for so long?”
- Gary Giddins, The New Yorker (2004; also Wikipedia)

Alton Glenn Miller was born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1904 to Lewis and Mattie Lou Miller. The family bounced around quite a bit during his youth – they went from Iowa, to Nebraska, to Missouri, to Colorado – but Miller’s love of music was a constant. He started with a mandolin his father brought home (this was probably Nebraska), but traded it for “an old battered horn” in short order, and practiced so much that his mother once said, “It got to where Pop and I used to wonder if he’d ever amount to anything.” They must have worried even more after he dropped out of the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1923 after failing three of five classes. Playing in any orchestra that would take him – Boyd Senter’s Denver-based orchestra was the main culprit – kept him from his studies, but Miller had already settled on a career as a professional musician two years earlier. The bug bit and he was beyond help.

After touring with various orchestras for the next couple years, Miller landed a solid gig as a trombonist in Ben Pollack’s orchestra out in LA. His solos dried up shortly after of one of the era’s great trombonists, Jack Teagarden, came on board and that little piece of fate nudged him to focus on arranging and composing. Miller started early, writing his first composition, “Room 1411,” with another aspiring musician, Benny Goodman; Wikipedia had something about him writing his signature song, “Moonlight Serenade,” during this period using the “Schillinger system,” but, as much as it adds up, that’s the only reference I saw to that. He took his newfound craft seriously enough to publish a songbook titled, Glenn Miller’s 125 Jazz Breaks for Trombone in 1928.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 40: Tommy Dorsey, aka, The Angry One

The beginning...of this story.

Far too many weeks ago, I profiled one half of the famous, tumultuous Dorsey Brothers. In this post, I talk about the brother who made it tumultuous. First, to set the scene:

“Dorsey was also an occasionally mean drunk who was known to fire many of his sidemen if they had an off night. He had an erratic personality, loving a good fight but also being warm and generous much of the time, as long as things went his way.”
- Syncopated Times biography (best of the bunch, fwiw)

“Tommy was always punching someone out.”
- Swingmusic.net biography

“…and so began Dorsey's long-running practice of raiding other bands for talent.”
- Radio Swiss Jazz biography

Finally, from a mash note to both Dorsey and the Swing era, in a post within a post on Swingmusic.net:

“He could be a rugged guy offstage or to work for, but on stage, he was there for the paying customers...and for the kids. In 1946, when the bottom dropped out of the band biz, he was one of the first leaders to cut his price to venues so that not only would he keep his guys working, but so that 'the kids will have something to come dance to' again.”

Tommy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania in 1905, 21 months after his older brother Jimmy. Their father, Thomas Francis Dorsey, Sr., was a bandleader, taught them play, they played with literally any musician 9/10th of the people who know something about the era could name, they recorded for the first time starting in the second half of the 1920s, they had formed the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra by then (though they recorded as the Dorsey Brothers Concert Orchestra, the Dorsey Brothers Novelty Orchestra, and the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra from 1928-33), but they only officially debuted it in 1934 at a ballroom up in New England. If that reads rushed, my apologies, but I touched on most of the details in my post on Jimmy Dorsey, and I’d direct anyone who curious about that to that post. For those who feel like they can do with less, this paragraph should catch you up nicely:

Crash Course Timeline, No. 39: Jimmy Dorsey, the Nice One

A man and his (signature) horn.

My favorite story about either of the Dorsey Brothers is the one about their famous split. From their Wikipedia page:

“The band performed live mainly in the New England area, with acrimony between the brothers steadily building up, until a definitive falling out between Tommy and Jimmy over the tempo of ‘I'll Never Say Never Again Again’ in May 1935, after which Tommy walked off the stage.”

That brotherly feud didn’t formally end for 18 years. Over tempo. Related, because I placed this chapter in the late 1930s/1940s, I decided to write about each Dorsey as they played and functioned for all those years, i.e., separately. From what I gather, Jimmy, the older brother and the subject of this post, was the nicer of the two. Then again, I’ve only really read his side so far.

James Francis Dorsey was born in 1904 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. His father worked as a coal miner at the time of his birth, but moved to teaching music at local schools and leading his own marching band shortly after. Both Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey played, and well, from a very young age, as demonstrated by the fact Jimmy started playing in his dad’s band by age seven. He started on trumpet and had the chops to play with a New York-based group called J. Carson McGee’s King Trumpeters by age nine, but he switched to the instrument that made him famous, the alto saxophone, by the time he turned 11. (Just to note it, he played clarinet as well, using the Albert system.)

It's fair to call both brothers precocious: as early as 1920, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey formed a third of their first band together, the Dorsey’s Novelty Six, a name they later changed to Dorsey’s Wild Canaries. They had some success with this group, even landed some airtime on the radio as “one of the first jazz bands to broadcast.” [Ed. - I can’t document it, but that doesn’t sound right.] With so much experience under their belts, and at such a young age, both Dorseys moved to New York to work as professional, full-time musicians.

Neither of them struggled for work. They played live, worked recording sessions, and did radio work throughout the 1920s, a lot of that time with decade’s best (e.g., the Paul Whiteman Orchestra). Jimmy, at least, played every orchestra of the 1920s I’ve ever heard of; he even recorded “the iconic 1927 jazz standard” “Singin’ the Blues” with the Frankie Trumbauer opposite the half-legendary Bix Beiderbecke. Before long, the Dorseys, some friends, peers and competitor built on what they learned playing in the ever-expanding orchestras of the late 1920s/early 1930s to create (white, mainstream) popular music’s next big thing. To name one early partner, Glenn Miller co-wrote, arranged and played trombone on a couple of collaborations with the Dorseys at the tail-end of the 1920s - e.g., “Annie's Cousin Fanny,” “Tomorrow’s Another Day,” and “Dese Dem Dose.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 35: The Rajah of Rhythm, The King of Swing, Benny Goodman

Know that I know what it took to make him smile....

Somewhere in the middle of 1935, shortly after a strike at Nabisco put NBC’s Let’s Dance on ice and gently flopping as a replacement for Guy Lombardo’s Orchestra at Manhattan’s Roosevelt Grill, Benny Goodman reformed an orchestra and took it on a cross-country tour. Or something like that; Wikipedia’stimeline is fer shit.

The band left with a couple of Goodman’s all-time hits to support - “King Porter Stomp” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” had just come out as a 78 rpm - and they had some successes as they went, particularly a show in Pittsburgh that saw young fans dancing in the aisles, but that proved an outlier. They arrived at Oakland’s McFadden Theater on August 19, 1935, expecting more the same, but instead they received the most rapt reception they’d had on the entire tour. When they played Pismo Beach the following night, they didn’t know what to expect…but, when yet another audience stayed polite and seated, they wrote off the McFadden gig as a fluke. Goodman et. al. had no reason to believe they’d just walked up to the cusp of history; nothing to that point had indicated otherwise.

After setting up at Los Angeles’ Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935, Goodman’s orchestra opened with stock arrangements. Faced with a muted response, Goodman and his orchestra put their heads together and decided to kick off the second set with arrangements by Fletcher Henderson and Spud Murphy. Somewhere in that huddle, Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, reportedly rallied behind the decision with this:

“If we're gonna die, Benny, let's die playing our own thing.”

Not only did Goodman, Krupa, Bunny Berigan and singer Helen Ward not die, the crowd at the Palomar went just as nuts as the crowd at McFadden’s. Music historians credit the Goodman Orchestra’s three-week engagement at the Palomar with officially kicking off The Swing Era. Other bands, some led by Goodman proteges, others by outcasts from Goodman’s orchestra, would join a musical movement that dominated American popular music for most of the next decade. Goodman’s great night at the Palomar was and wasn’t an accident - and for reasons I’ll get into below - but, as a music writer named Donald Clarke put it:

“It is clear in retrospect that the Swing Era had been waiting to happen, but it was Goodman and his band that touched it off.”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 23: Introducing the 1930s, Conductors, Crooners, and Big Bands

The medium of the moment.

This post kicks off the exploration of bands and artists from the 1930s, which will extend over the next 21(?) posts in this series. Before digging the selected artist, I wanted to provide a little context for the decade to help put people in the mood for the music.

The 1920s ended with a literal crash, of course, when an overheated, over-leveraged stock market imploded in October 1929. The rot went deeper - farms had been struggling through the 1920s - and soon seeped into every corner of the economy, leading to insolvent banks and the collapse of the consumer economy. Decades of over-farming/grazing in habitats that couldn’t handle it (America’s Great Plains) created the infamous Dust Bowl (it was no spontaneous event), which expanded the misery still further and sent people scrambling to the cities and the coasts in search of work. A popular statistic notes that 25% of Americans couldn’t find work in the depths of the Great Depression, something that points to the long-standing, glass-half-empty that most people (myself flaming included) talk about the news - i.e., that means 75% of the country could. Belts tightened, but the world still turned, basically, as demonstrated by the series of details I mined out of a 1930s timeline.

1930 saw the invention of the analog computer by Vannevar Bush and Clarence Birdseye patented the quick-freezing process that made frozen food possible; the Empire State Building opened for business in 1931 and Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the “Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem the same year; voters swapped Hoover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following year and Bruno Hauptmann kidnapped the son of (Nazi afficionado) Charles Lindbergh; the New Deal launched during FDR’s first 100 days in early 1933, which he promoted over the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit only four under par); Social Security started the next year, but wouldn’t pay out benefits until two years later, and Porgy & Bess (“the first distinctly American opera") opened, but Babe Ruth’s career ended; in 1936, a strong majority of Americans handed FDR a second term (he won 62% of the vote) and Jesse Owens took four giant, salutary shits on Hitler’s “master-race” delusion at the Berlin Olympics (one for each gold medal); San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, first to pedestrians, then to cars; a National Minimum Wage was set at $0.25 in 1938 and Orson Welles broadcast his radio drama, War of the Worlds; and, finally, the United States held not one but two big, optimistic World’s Fairs in 1939, one in Queens, New York, the other, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition: a lot of shit happened, and that’s just about a quarter of it.

Popular culture did what it could to soothe all the trouble and uncertainty by putting on a happy face. For instance:

“Hollywood responded to the economic anxiety that dominated the lives of Americans during the Depression by producing films that maintained a self-conscious optimism.”