In this blog, I have writ­ten about both Elvis Pres­ley and the Bea­t­les, but before them, in an extra­or­di­nary four year peri­od between 1938 and 1942, there was a man who scored 23 num­ber-one hits in the US: band­leader and icon of the swing era, Glenn Miller. Miller was per­haps an unlike­ly star and cer­tain­ly a reluc­tant one, as he shied away from the spot­light and hat­ed per­son­al appear­ances, but he nonethe­less had such an ear for melody and such keen arrang­ing skills that most of his out­put became clas­sics of the age – think Moon­light Ser­e­nade, Penn­syl­va­nia 6–5000, Tuxe­do Junc­tion, Chat­tanooga Choo Choo, and of course In the Mood, one of the best dance songs to emerge from the peri­od and the one big band song that gave the swing era its defin­ing moment.

Miller had cut his teeth as a free­lance trom­bon­ist in a vari­ety of bands in the late 1920s and ear­ly 1930s, and worked as a com­pos­er and arranger for the Dorsey broth­ers. He had put an orches­tra togeth­er for British band­leader Ray Noble in 1935, and in 1937 formed his first band, but this proved short-lived after fail­ing to dis­tin­guish itself from the pletho­ra of rival bands. Miller knew that he need­ed a unique sound and in 1938 he put togeth­er an arrange­ment with the clar­inet play­ing a melod­ic line with a tenor sax­o­phone hold­ing the same note, while three oth­er sax­o­phones har­monised with­in a sin­gle octave. It soon became the basis of the “Miller sound”, the tem­plate for what big band music would sound like.

In the Mood is based on an old jazz riff that had been passed around in var­i­ous incar­na­tions for many a year. It was a fel­low named Joe Gar­land who cre­at­ed a new arrange­ment for the riff with the title of “In the Mood”, but it was Miller who pared the tune down to its bare essen­tials. Released in Sep­tem­ber 1939, the tune went on to top the charts in the US for thir­teen straight weeks. With its famous intro­duc­tion fea­tur­ing the sax­o­phones in uni­son, the catchy riff anchor­ing the tune, the two solos (a “tenor fight” between sax­o­phon­ists Tex Beneke and Al Klink, and a 16-bar trum­pet solo by Clyde Hur­ley), and the sus­pense-build­ing end­ing, it has all the Miller spe­cial­i­ties. A true mod­el of sus­pense and dynam­ics. Here it is as fea­tured in the 1941 movie Sun Val­ley Ser­e­nade.