Critical reaction
In 2004, Miller orchestra bassist
Trigger Alpert explained the band's success: "Miller had America's music pulse... He knew what would please the listeners."
[55] Although Miller was popular, many jazz critics had misgivings. They believed that the band's endless rehearsals—and, according to critic Amy Lee in
Metronome magazine, "letter-perfect playing"—removed feeling from their performances.
[56] They also felt that Miller's brand of swing shifted popular music from the hot jazz of
Benny Goodman and
Count Basie to commercial novelty instrumentals and vocal numbers.
[57] After Miller died, the Miller estate maintained an unfriendly stance toward critics who derided the band during his lifetime.
[58]
Miller was often criticized for being too commercial. His answer was, "I don't want a jazz band."
[59][60] Many modern jazz critics harbor similar antipathy. In 1997, on a web site administered by
JazzTimes magazine, Doug Ramsey considers him overrated. "Miller was a businessman who discovered a popular formula from which he allowed little departure. A disproportionate ratio of nostalgia to substance keeps his music alive."
[61][62][63]
Jazz critics Gunther Schuller
[64] (1991),
Gary Giddins[65][66] (2004) and
Gene Lees (2007)
[67] have defended Miller from criticism. In an article written for
The New Yorker magazine in 2004, Giddins said these critics erred in denigrating Miller's music and that the popular opinion of the time should hold greater sway. "Miller exuded little warmth on or off the bandstand, but once the band struck up its theme, audiences were done for: throats clutched, eyes softened. Can any other record match 'Moonlight Serenade' for its ability to induce a Pavlovian slaver in so many for so long?"
[65] Schuller, notes, "[The Miller sound] was nevertheless very special and able to penetrate our collective awareness that few other sounds have..."
[68] He compares it to "Japanese
Gagaku [and] Hindu music" in its purity.
[68] Schuller and Giddins do not take completely uncritical approaches to Miller. Schuller says that Ray Eberle's "lumpy, sexless vocalizing dragged down many an otherwise passable performance."
[68] But Schuller notes, "How much further [Miller's] musical and financial ambitions might have carried him must forever remain conjectural. That it would have been significant, whatever form(s) it might have taken, is not unlikely."
[68]
Reaction from musical peers
Louis Armstrong thought enough of Miller to carry around his recordings, transferred to seven-inch tape reels when he went on tour. "[Armstrong] liked musicians who prized melody, and his selections ranged from Glenn Miller to
Jelly Roll Morton to
Tchaikovsky."
[69] Jazz pianist
George Shearing's quintet of the 1950s and 1960s was influenced by Miller: "with Shearing's
locked hands style piano (influenced by the voicing of Miller's saxophone section) in the middle [of the quintet's harmonies]".
[70][71] Frank Sinatra and
Mel Tormé held the orchestra in high regard. Tormé credited Miller with giving him helpful advice when he first started his singing and song-writing career in the 1940s. Mel Tormé met Glenn Miller in 1942, the meeting facilitated by Tormé's father and Ben Pollack. Tormé and Miller discussed "
That Old Black Magic", which was just emerging as a new song by
Johnny Mercer and
Harold Arlen. Miller told Tormé to pick up every song by Mercer and study it and to become a voracious reader of anything he could find, because "all good lyric writers are great readers."
[72] In an interview with George T. Simon in 1948, Sinatra lamented the inferior quality of music he was recording in the late forties, in comparison with "those great Glenn Miller things"
[73] from eight years earlier. Frank Sinatra's recording sessions from the late forties and early fifties use some Miller musicians. Trigger Alpert, a bassist from the civilian band, Zeke Zarchy for the Army Air Forces Band and Willie Schwartz, the lead clarinetist from the civilian band back up Frank Sinatra on many recordings.
[74][75] With opposite opinion, fellow bandleader
Artie Shaw frequently disparaged the band after Miller's death: "All I can say is that Glenn should have lived, and 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' should have died."
[76][77] Clarinetist
Buddy DeFranco surprised many people when he led the
Glenn Miller Orchestra in the late sixties and early seventies. De Franco was already a veteran of bands like
Gene Krupa and Tommy Dorsey in the 1940s. He was also a major exponent of modern jazz in the 1950s.
[78] He never saw Miller as leading a swinging jazz band, but DeFranco is extremely fond of certain aspects of the Glenn Miller style. "I found that when I opened with the sound of 'Moonlight Serenade', I could look around and see men and women weeping as the music carried them back to years gone by."
[79][80] De Franco says, "the beauty of Glenn Miller's ballads [...] caused people to dance together."
[81]
