Mitch Miller: Jazz Friend or Foe?

Few figures in jazz history were more enigmatic than Mitch Miller. While news of his passing on July 31 in New York at age 99 marked the end of an era, the coverage served as a reminder of just how baffling many of his decisions were in the 1950s and how jazz fared in their wake. Though most Miller tributes yesterday and today note that his vision and taste as a Columbia record producer and performer appealed most to those who were alienated by rock and roll, I would argue that these writers have it backward.

In truth, rock and roll was a direct reaction to Miller and the kind of bland music he championed. Miller once said, "In three seconds I can tell a talent." But his undimmed ardor for sticky pop music to boost revenue at Columbia Records alienated kids just as they were gaining access to portable phonographs. While much praise has been bestowed on Miller for having an unrivaled mainstream ear and golden mass-market gut, his Sherman-like crusade in the 1950s on behalf of banality always seemed odd considering his formal musical training and performance work on earlier great jazz recordings. Many of Miller's decisions fostered lazy listening habits and inadvertently helped doom jazz's chances for greater acceptance.

Between 1950 and 1955, Miller's music choices as the all-powerful head of Columbia Records A&R department drove teens to regional r&b and eventually rock and roll. Many of the records Miller produced were alien to growing numbers of young people who were culturally allergic to the calendar images Miller set to music. To them, much of what Miller produced lacked feeling, sexuality or vitality.

By the mid-1950s, the rise of the vinyl 45-rpm, expansion of independent radio, proliferation of car radios and ever-larger jukeboxes created a sub-rosa market for new music. The target audience of this renegade effort was teens whose tastes and desires were all but ignored by Miller and his industry peers. Regional radio and new record-pressing and distribution channels meant rural artists no longer had to beg intermediaries to reach out to top executives at major record labels. By the mid-1950s, these towering powers could be bypassed—much in the way the Internet 50 years later would bypass traditional publishing.

The rise of r&b, country and blues in the early 1950s is a direct result of independent labels and the music they chose to produce. By 1954 and 1955, virtually anyone could have a hit record, and for the first time in history, anyone did. Hits were only possible if listeners were willing to feed the jukeboxes and buy the records. And teens were more than ready.

It's hardly a surprise, therefore, that rock and roll's biggest hits recorded in 1955 were produced not by Columbia but by  independent labels. Chuck Berry's Maybellene and Bo Diddley's [pictured] Bo Diddley were on Chess, Little Richard's Tutti Frutti was on Specialty and Carl Perkins' Blue Suede Shoes was on Sun. Teens were openly rebelling against Mitch Miller and the music he produced. Their parents were just collateral punching bag for this rage and resentment.

For every Tony Bennett produced by Miller on Columbia, there were dozens of others who were cloy and insipid. Even Bennett bristled under Miller's vision and commercial hectoring. In his 1998 autobiography, "The Good Life," Bennett spoke of Miller's addiction to novelty numbers. "As much as we liked each other," Bennett said, "there was always tension between us. I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people."

To be fair, Miller's job was to make money, and make money he did. But at what cost to jazz, especially as rock and roll flooded the marketplace in the mid and late 1950s? Miller did appear on oboe and English horn on Charlie Parker with Strings in 1949 and he did produce several terrific Dinah Washington sessions for Mercury in the late 1940s. He also recorded with Mildred Bailey, Stuff Smith and Elliott Lawrence in the mid-1940s. And he signed gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to Columbia in the 1950s, recorded pianist Erroll Garner and was a supporter of singer Leslie Uggams. [Pictured: Charlie Parker with studio orchestra in 1949; Mitch Miller is fourth from the right]

But Miller never quite forgave rock and its ability to skirt the system and pull the rug out from under him. Said Miller in 1996 about rock: "I can't get interested in people who can only sing songs with three chords in them." That comment echoes, since it would include the blues and at the same time ignores an entire generation's desires [Pictured: Fats Domino]

Miller's reign at Columbia in the early and mid-1950s gave birth to rock and roll , which instantly won over teens who craved music with a feel. During this creative feud between established and independent pop and rock music forces, jazz increasingly found itself with the short straw and much less influential culturally. Eventually, Miller lost the battle of attrition with rock, but by then jazz was much less meaningful to record buyers.

Ultimately, one can't come down too hard on Miller's taste or his desire to succeed and give audiences what they wanted. It's just a shame that he became as powerful as he did and didn't see an equally important place for jazz in mainstream America.

Comments

[Joel Lewis]

The rather neutral comments in the Miller obits have a lot to do with the fact that he had vanished as a tastemaker nearly 45 years ago. Clive Davis had to fire him as Columbia was falling behind badly in the post Beatle-era & Davis himself was the one who personally signed up acts like Janis Joplin, Santana and Chicago. Even John Hammond, a man of equally strong opinions on what made 'good muisc', could ease out of his comfort zone & sign up someone like Denny Zeitlin and, amazingly, Horacee Arnold.

A telling encounter was Link Wray's brief stay at Columbia. Link Wray was signed up through Columbia's nashville office and released a number of classic rock n' roll instrumentals. Miller urged him to record mainstream numbers & Wray refused. If one is to believe the ever fabulating Wray, the guitarist arrived at a NY recording session to see that a full orchestra was awaiting him to record some of Miller's mainstream material. Wray walked out & went back to the small labels that would record his music.

Miller's stand against rock & roll seemed contradictory. If you saw your role as making maximum money for your company, who cares if the singer can't sing and the song has two chords? Give the listener what they want, right?

In an odd note, Miller apparently was of a liberal political bent & did release a sing-a-along album called "Mitch sings for peace" (or something like that) that consisted of civil right anthems and the like. Go figure.

[David]

According to Will Friedwald's obit, Miller virtually invented the role of the modern record producer. In that sense he could be viewed as the father of hip-hop. Rosemary Clooney has a funny account in her book about refusing to sing an especially corny song until Mitch started to rip up her contract. The song became a hit and revived her career, but she had to sing it at every engagement for the rest of her life, possibly contributing to a nervous breakdown. When I was a kid, movie houses would play ditties before the feature with the words on screen and a little bouncing ball as a cursor. It was a bizarre experience even then; but today we have karaoke.

[Claude Neuman]

“Said Miller in 1996 about rock: "I can't get interested in people who can only sing songs with three chords in them." That comment echoes, since it would include the blues and at the same time ignores an entire generation's desires.”

Maybe a generation’s desires are molded by what is pushed at them as much as anything else (when the big bands were aired on network radio, they fitted the previous generation’s).
But assuming that generation’s desires were indeed for rustic simplicity, indeed if Columbia and the other majors had recorded the blues and marketed it to a wide audience, it may have saved us from it’s plagiarized american and british versions called rock&roll.
And that may have maintained a climate less foreign to jazz, since whereas blues is a simple music, it swings.
By the way (I’m thinking here of your interview of Ted Gioia), blues is a simple music, yes … except if you listen to the great post-war electric blues guitar players (some of whom remained in their prime as late as into the 80’s while jazz per se had entered into a state of perplexion), who are every bit as impressive in their own way as their jazz soloists counterparts, and did to the guitar what jazz brass and reed players did to their own instruments, make it recall the inflexions of the human voice : T-Bone Walker, Robert Nighthawk, B.B. King, Albert King, Albert Collins, Brewer Phillips, Otis Rush, Jimmy Dawkins, (early) Buddy Guy, Fenton Robinson, Jimmy Johnson…
If their music had been effectively marketed to the young of both races in the 50’s and 60’s they may not have had to wait for the british to steal and bowdlerize it, for some of them to finally make a pittance.

P.S. : Marc,I'm so glad I discovered your blog! Thanks a million and keep trucking.

[Grant Tietinger]

Hmmmm... did any body ever see Mitch Miller and Skitch Henderson in the same room at the same time?

Just wondering.

[Theo Morgan-Gan]

Great blog! I'm quite saddened by Mitch's death, being a total sucker for the "sicky pop stuff"... I think the guy was a genius, but agree with the comment that for someone so commercially minded, ignoring RnR was a great mistake.

There's a fantastic book on Mitch just waiting to be written.

[Steve Provizer]

Elijah Wald's book-How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music-makes the case that Miller did a lot of creative things, like: "Miller's combination of Hank Williams's songwriting with big band singers Jo Stafford and Frankie Laine and the outer-space steel guitar of Speedy West on "Tonight We're Setting the Woods on Fire."

As far as Rosemary Clooney-I assume you're talking about "Come On A My House," with its cooking harpsichord. My point is that anyone with a hit record is forced to either make peace with performing it incessantly or let it be an unending source of despair.

[Ted Steinberg]

Marc, you forgot to mention his most famous contribution. Perhaps you were too young to recall his modeling for The Statues of Lenin. He's Russian, you know; you can check with the KGB, they're up on the arts. When the Berlin Wall came down and I saw all those Mitch Millers being towed off, I said, "maybe, now I can listen to Charlie Parker with Strings" without picturing the pursing lips of Maestro Miller. He was unable to appreciate music before or after his demise. Other than his modeling skills I wasn't too crazy about his pap, and his mom wasn't that great either.

[Bill Kirchner]

Wasn't the recording of Erroll Garner by Columbia in the '50s more due to George Avakian than Mitch Miller?

[David]

Steve, Tony Bennett says that he still loves singing "San Francisco" but I suspect that the only thing he loves about it is the adoring smiles on the audience's faces. He also claims to have physically thrown up at Columbia studios after Clive Davis made him do an album of contemporary hits in the '70s. In a late interview with Gary Giddins, Kay Starr expressed great dismay at being forced to record the hits that made her famous. Duke Ellington used to keep his 'required' numbers fresh by constantly rearranging them, sometimes radically. (I assume that "cooking harpsichord" is a reference to the food-related lyrics. Good one.)

[David]

I wonder if the harpsichordist might have been Stan Freeman who played that instrument on many Columbia recordings. He was also an excellent jazz pianist and cabaret singer, in spite of a lousy voice. He even had a short piano solo right in the middle of Bird's classic solo on "Just Friends."

[Mel Narunsky]

I thought George Avakian was the big producer and A&R man for jazz at Columbia during the 1950s and 1960s. Teo Macero was another.

Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I was aware Mitch Miller had nothing to do with jazz record production.

[David]

I'm not vouching for any of this, but a recent book review of a new bio of Frank Sinatra suggests that Mitch's song choices were a major factor in Sinatra's suicide attempt during a career lull.