Glen played trombone in the school band, and although no one seems to have thought of him as an exceptional musician, he took his music more seriously than he did any sport. After graduating in 1921 he delayed going to college in order to take a job in a band organized by a saxophone and clarinet player named Boyd Senter. In January 1923, Miller entered the University of Colorado, where he seems to have spent most of his time playing in a popular campus band. At the year’s end, he dropped out of school to set upon the risky career of a full-time musician.

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Glenn got his first big break in Los Angeles when he was hired to play in, and arrange for, the Ben Pollack band. A pioneer in expanding the small ensemble (usually of five to seven musicians) characteristic of 1920s jazz into the full-fledged Big Band, Pollack had an ear for good musicians. Over the years he hired not only Miller, but also the fine Chicago cornetist Jimmy McPartland; trumpeter Charlie Spivak, who went on to form his own Big Band in 1940; Benny Goodman; trumpeter Harry James; and a trombone player who was obviously Miller’s superior–the bluesy Jack Teagarden from Texas.

Although jazz always remained his first love, Miller himself was never a good enough instrumentalist to be a great jazz musician. Benny Goodman once said that Glenn ‘was a pedestrian trombone player and he knew it.’ When Teagarden joined the Pollack band, Glenn saw the handwriting on the wall and determined to concentrate on arranging, an art for which he had a rare talent and which he had been studying with the esteemed teacher Joseph Schillinger.

Certain that his arranging assignments and occasional playing would provide a measure of financial security, he wired Helen Burger, the girl he had met in college, and proposed that she come to New York to marry him. They were wed on October 6, 1928. It was a most successful marriage. Said one of Glenn’s friends: ‘The greatest thing that ever happened to Glenn Miller was Helen Miller.’

During the next few years, Miller arranged for Paul Ash, Red Nichols, and several lesser-known band leaders. He also filled in on the trombone with established bands and found himself playing in the orchestra pit for Broadway productions. In 1934 he was the first musician hired, both for his musicianship and his skills as an arranger, by the Dorseys when they formed their first band.

Glenn’s association with the Dorseys lasted only a few months. Late in 1934 British band leader Ray Noble arrived in the United States to try his hand at wooing American audiences, who had heard and bought recordings that his ‘orchestra’–in reality an assemblage of musicians from other ensembles–had made in England. Anxious to cash in on the popularity of his records, Noble hired Glenn away from the squabbling brothers and gave him his first experience at organizing a Big Band. The group Miller put together included some of the finest musicians of the day, and for a time the Noble Orchestra drew crowds to the Rainbow Room atop New York’s RCA Building.

It was while with the Noble Orchestra that Glenn got his first opportunity to stand before a Big Band as leader. It was an experience he was eager to turn into a permanent situation. So in 1936 he decided to take the chance and begin recruiting musicians for a group of his own. It was a huge gamble, but one to which he brought estimable assets–his solid track record as an arranger and his shrewd commercial sense of what the public would welcome. He was also a very organized person; arranger Rolly Bundock called him ‘the General MacArthur of the music business.’

The Glenn Miller Band played its first engagement in May, 1937 at the Hotel New Yorker. The band went to Boston and then to New Orleans, where it was a huge success (though not financially; Miller himself was taking home a little less than six dollars a week). After that, it was all downhill, and the group could not earn enough to cover expenses. To compound Miller’s woes, his wife had an operation that made it impossible for her to have children (years later the couple adopted a boy and a girl). Following a New Year’s Eve engagement, Glenn broke the news to the band members that he had decided to call it quits. The band played its last date on January 2, 1938.

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