Miller bands still abound their leaders often squabbling over which is the

Miller bands still abound, their leaders often squabbling over which is the "official" one. The best of them, most faithful to the original music, was the one led by Ray McKinley "Glenn Miller should have lived. His music should have died" is a tenet of the New York jazz musician's philosophy. For in truth, as you will know if you have been driven mad by the unceasing performances of the Miller hit "In The Mood" during the VE celebrations, Miller's music, skilled for the time, was carefully aimed at an audience with a low threshold of pain as far as activity of the intellect was concerned. It is a stagnant music without inspiration, to be repeated remorselessly without variation.

It should be hell for the musicians who have to play it. The sections in Miller's band were so closely knit and precise that there was rarely any feeling for swing. McKinley loosened the music up a bit when his band played it But not much. "You've got to have that individual Miller sound in everything you do," McKinley said. "The people come to hear 'Little Brown Jug' or 'Moonlight Serenade' as it was, without changes The arrangements don't need updating I think that's where the others missed the boat. What we are doing is marketing a product that's familiar." Ironically, Buddy de Franco, the clarinettist who succeeded McKinley as leader of the Miller graveyard band, had been fired by Tommy Dorsey for changing a solo from the original one he had played on a Dorsey hit record."It's not artistic to play the same solo all the time," he told Dorsey "Who d'you think you are, Count Basie?" Dorsey snarled "Go and be artistic on someone else's band.

You're fired."Miller and McKinley first met in Chicago (where Mc-Kinley was almost crippled when a gangster's stray bullet smashed his leg as he played in a night club). An expert and tasteful drummer, McKinley, when he enlisted in the army, was Miller's first choice for the US Army Air Force Band which he formed and later brought to Europe in July 1944. This was the band shown at an open-air concert in London in the film The Glenn Miller Story (1953). As the audience cowered when an air raid began, the band played on unflinchingly until the raid was over. The audience gave Miller, in the person of the uncoordinated James Stewart, a standing ovation. The truth was that when Miller arrived in London and realised that the city was still vulnerable to German attack he insisted that he and the band were billeted outside the target area. Comfortably ensconced near Bedford, the band were swept by panic when a wayward V1 doodlebug staggered at the outer limits of its range and fell back on a nearby building.Miller's band was split into sections to make small groups.