Irving Mills

Brunswick 78er by Irving Mills & His Hotsy Totsy Gang: "High and Dry"

Irving Mills (born January 16, 1894 in New York , † April 21, 1985 in Palm Springs , California) was an American music publisher , producer, composer and singer.

Live and act

Irving Mills was initially a pop singer and then recognized - at the end of the 1910s - his opportunity in the rapidly growing music business. He worked first as a musical sales agent, then as a song promoter ("song plugger") for Broadway producer Lew Leslie; he traveled around, going to clubs and dance halls, trying to accommodate Leslie's pieces. In 1919 he founded the company "Mills Music" with his brother Jack.

Irving and Jack Mills discovered a number of great songwriters , such as Sammy Fain , Harry Barris , Gene Austin , Hoagy Carmichael , Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields . They also promoted the careers of jazz and entertainment greats like Cab Calloway , Duke Ellington , Ben Pollack , Jack Teagarden , Benny Goodman , Will Hudson , Raymond Scott and many others. In the early 1920s, the Mills brothers benefited from the blues boom with the success of Mamie Smith 's "Crazy Blues" track. They bought countless blues compositions, which got him into black show business.

In the 1920s, Irving Mills was also active as a singer of hits; with his formation Irving Mills and his Hotsy Totsy Gang , he worked with jazz musicians as sidemen such as Tommy Dorsey , Jimmy Dorsey , Joe Venuti , Eddie Lang , Arnold Brillhardt , Arthur Schutt , Pee Wee Russell and Manny Klein . with Fats Waller's " Ain't Misbehavin ' " (1929) and Hoagy Carmichael's " Stardust " (1930) he also had two hits in the top 30 charts .

Like other music publishers, Mills wanted the songs he bought to be recorded on records so that they could be better exploited. For this purpose, however, Mills needed orchestras; for cost reasons he was looking for a black orchestra. One night in the fall of 1926, Mills came to a small club on Manhattan's West 49th Street between 7th Avenue and Broadway called the Kentucky Club. The owner had hired a band from Washington, DC , the former "The Washingtonians" . Mills heard the band now called Duke Ellington and his Kentucky Club Orchestra . The next day he signed them and immediately recorded a large number of records with them. Duke benefited from Mills as he needed a white manager to be successful in what was then opaque show business.

The connection with Mills gave Ellington's career a huge boost; on the other hand, Mills was in a better position. So he could put his own name under the Ellington compositions and now earn one more time from them. As a result, Mills is listed as a co-author of countless Ellington titles without having initially been the author : " Mood Indigo ", " Solitude ", " It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing) ", " Sophisticated Lady ", " Black and Tan Fantasy " and many others. Mills was thus able to share in the royalties and at the same time improved its ASCAP category.

He urged Ellington to compose a lot, was involved in writing and had a certain talent for changing the compositions for the successful record release. Mills said: "Whatever they did, I thinned it out. His music was always so heavy. He over-arranged ... I simplified most of the pieces." He arranged the orchestra's contract with the Cotton Club and sent them to theirs in 1932 first tour of England. Shortly before his major European tour in 1939, Ellington ended business relations with Irving Mills.

Mills was among the first to record the black and white musicians together. Mills also discovered Blanche Calloway and her brother Cab Calloway . He also used the Ellington Orchestra and their musicians as a kind of "shadow band". He also recorded his own pieces with the " Mills Blue Rhythm Band ". Calloway performed with this band at the Cotton Club, where they popularized the piece "Minnie the Moocher" that Mills had written with Calloway and Clarence Gaskill .

In order to be able to make even more recordings with his contract musicians, Mills invented the "band within the band" process by recording records with "small groups" - made up of musicians from the big bands. Mills began this in 1928 with members of Ben Pollack's band , whom he had recorded for various labels, while Pollack himself had an exclusive contract with Victor . This method was later used by Benny Goodman , Artie Shaw and other band leaders.

In 1936 he founded - together with Herbert Yates (who owned the Consolidated Film company) - the record labels "Master" and "Variety", which were later bought by Brunswick and Vocalion . Irving Mills had planned the two companies as low-cost labels to market the "small group" recordings; The "Variety-Label" records sold for 35 cents or 3 for a dollar, the "Master" label records sold for 75 cents. From December 1936 to September 1937 he made a series of recordings (40 titles with Masters - including from the Hudson-DeLange Orchestra , of which he was co-owner - and 170 on Variety). Master's most successful artists were Duke Ellington , Raymond Scott , Casper Reardon and Adrian Rollini . "Variety" s catalog included the recordings of Cab Calloway , Red Nichols , and the "small group" recordings of musicians from the Ellington Band such as Barney Bigard , Cootie Williams , Rex Stewart and Johnny Hodges , as well as Noble Sissle , Frankie Newton , The Three Peppers , Chu Berry , Billy Kyle and many other musicians from the jazz and popular music scene in and around New York at the time. At the end of 1937 the two labels were finished. Mills tried to market the records in Europe, but did not succeed. After the collapse of the label, the "Master" records from "Brunswick", those from "Variety" were taken over by "Vocalion" (and later released by Columbia ).

Through his recording activities, Mills became the head of the American Recording Company, now part of Columbia Records. He also made a motion picture, Stormy Weather (1943), which featured jazz greats like Lena Horne , Cab Calloway, Zutty Singleton and Fats Waller, as well as legendary dancers like the "Nicholas Brothers" and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson . Over 350 pieces of music are copyrighted to Mills by ASCAP, including classics like Mood Indigo ; this composition alone is registered with over 100 recordings.

He earned his place in the history of jazz in particular through his business skills in popularizing jazz, especially for his contributions to promoting black artists.

literature

• James Lincoln Collier : Duke Ellington. Genius of jazz. Revised edition. Ullstein, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-548-35839-X ( Ullstein 35839).

Web links

• English-language biography about Mills

Remarks

1. ↑ Between 1919 and 1965, when the brothers "Mills Music, Inc." sold, they had built the largest independent music publisher in the world.
2. ↑ Collier p. 103. In the complex system according to which the money that was distributed to lyricists, composers and publishers by playing ASCAP pieces, the length of membership in the collecting society played a role. On the other hand, the fact that his name was on the Ellington songs drove Mills even more to promote them massively
3. ↑ cit. after Collier. He confirms that at the time Ellington tended to write heavy structures that were too complicated for the ordinary listener . Louis Metcalf said, "Mills always softened the arrangements, turned them around". With this, Mills made the compositions commercially acceptable, and propagated them accordingly.
4. ↑ With 12 white musicians and the Duke Ellington Orchestra , he had a 78 record from the "St. Louis Blues" recorded on one side; on the back there was a medley of songs entitled "Gems from Blackbirds of 1928", where he sang with the Ellington Orchestra.
5. ↑ ASCAP entry for Mills
6. ↑ A leading black newspaper called him the Abraham Lincoln of Music.