A LIBERATOR BASE, Aug. 20 – Maj. Glenn Miller, still scorching his trombone with sweet breaks, has brought his magical arrangements and a 45-man band of GIs to the swing-hungry ETO, and if luck holds he hopes to offer two Continental concerts for an all soldier audience – in Paris and Berlin. In a room marked “Gentlemen” – the only place he could be separated from throngs of idolators and autograph seekers (it was crowded but the jostling was more purposeful) – Miller told how thrilled he was by his present mission. “Gen. Doolittle put it best,” Miller said “when he told us that every soldier over here is bucking for one thing – to get home. He can’t do that until the job is done, so the next best thing is to bring a little bit of home to him. That’s our mission”.
By way of fulfilling it, Miller confines his concerts to the old familiar tunes, each with their thousands of memories for the soldier. “They haven’t heard the new tunes” he explained, “but ‘String of Pearls’, ‘In the Mood’, ‘Cow-Cow Boogie’, ‘Moonlight Serenade’ and ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ remind them of the days and nights they treasured. And the lads eat it up”.
Miller, whose band was tops in the U. S. for three years before he volunteered for the Army, he was over age at the time, used to count the house in civilian life – “every head meant about 60 cents to me” – but now, he says, his reward comes from the eager faces, alive and thankful for the memories. “The best night’s pay I ever got was watching those faces light up when we played,” he said. “I feel now as though I am doing something very worthwhile.”
He wants no controversy with Sigmund Romberg and the other long-haired musicians back home who claim the GI will want musical sedatives other than jive after the war. His answer is simply “let them bring that kind of music over here and see for themselves.”
Miller thinks his GI band is better than the one that brought him fame in the States. He has a string section of 20 men – drawn from the Cleveland, Boston and New York Philharmonic orchestras – so called “long-hairs” who, as one of them put it, are delighted because Miller is a real musician and he knows what those boys out there want.”
Five members of the band played with Miller as civilians – among them S/Sgt. Jimmy Priddy on the trombone, M/Sgt. Zeke Zerchy on the trumpet and S/Sgt. “Trigger” Alpert on the bass. Pianist Sgt. Mel Powell was with Benny Goodman. S/Sgt. Hank Freeman was first sax with Artie Shaw, Sgt. Bobby Nichols was a trumpeter with Vaughn Monroe, Sgt. Bernie Privin played trumpet with Charlie Barnet, Goodman and Shaw and Sgt. Carmen Mastren was a guitarist with Tommy Dorsey. One of them, T/Sgt. Ray McKinley, led a well-known band of his own after years on the drums with the Dorsey Bros. and later with Jimmy Dorsey’s crew, and his drum solo is the highlight of the Miller program.
Also in the organization – which is really a complete radio production outfit – are T/Sgt. Jerry Gray, an arranger with both Miller and Shaw in civilian life, who wrote “String of Pearls” and “Here We Go Again” and made the famous arrangements of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” for Miller and “Begin the Beguine” for Shaw; arrangers S/Sgt. Ralph Wilkinson, with Raymond Page and Andre Kostelanetz, and M/Sgt. Norman Leyden, who directed the music for Moss Hart’s “Winged Victory.” Lt. Don Haynes, Miller’s civilian manager, is his Army “booking agent.”
At this base, the heavy bomber group under Col. Luther J. Fairbanks of Burt, Iowa celebrated its 100th mission – and Miller’s band was the big event. In a giant hangar more than 3,000 GIs and their gals weaved and writhed like an agitated sea as Miller and his men went “In the Mood”. This was a Saturday night in Duluth, Atlanta, Portland, Punxutawney, Pa., and 3,000 other places in America, and one look at the sea of faces explained Miller’s “it’s the best night pay I ever got.”
Listen to the 1943 Christmas radio broadcast.
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