Please click to comment on Reddit.on this day the proprietor of the popular jazz cafe Pennsylvania 6-5000 Glenn Miller died at his home in New York City. He was eighty-eight years old.

Right up until the end he was an occasional player too, setting down his little brown jug of alcohol to thrill members of the audience who were in the mood for the big band sound. Of course Miller was there at the birth, touring with his own band up until the American entrance into the Second World War. They disbanded in 1942.

Aged thirty-eight, Miller was too old for the draft but determined not to miss out. And it was during this period of preoccupation that a clarinetist and alto saxophonist Wilbur Schwartz came forward and suggested an unusual refinement to the big band sound - to have a clarinet play a melodic line with a tenor saxophone holding the same note, while three other saxophones harmonized within a single octave. It was a sophisticated, and potentially innovative suggestion, but at first it just sounded _wrong_ and there was no time to work it through.

Before long, Miller found himself serving in the US Army Air Force. Stationed in Great Britain he soon realised that he was now too old to pursue a professional career in music, instead he dreamt of opening a jazz cafe after the war.

And so following his demobilization, Miller returned to the States, and after a short spell settled in Manhattan. He was able to use his military pension to open an establishment which he would ultimately run for almost half a century.

Some nights he would recall Schwartz's idea and by the mid 1960s he began to experiment with the sound again, this time successfully. Because as that crazy Schwartz always used to say, "it dont mean a thing if it aint' got that swing".