From more than four decades on,
Glenn Miller Time -- 1965 may seem an unlikely recording project. The year 1965, after all, marked a continuation of the British Invasion in rock & roll music, with the volume and the attitude stepped up several notches amid the success of
the Rolling Stones et al., and it was also the year of the folk-rock explosion and dozens of other pop culture phenomena that seem a long way from anything to do with
Glenn Miller -- who had been gone just a couple of weeks past 20 years at the time of these recording sessions. But the mid-'60s also saw a less widely publicized yet incontestable '40s nostalgia boom among audience members over 40 (remember how popular blockbuster war movies were then, not to mention World War II television series such as Combat?). What's more, at the time, the officially sanctioned Glenn Miller Orchestra under
Ray McKinley was one of the most heavily booked performing outfits in the world, and as luck had it, trumpet legend
Bobby Hackett -- who had played with the
Miller band before World War II -- was signed to Epic at the time, just as the Miller Orchestra got a contract with the label.
Hackett is the featured soloist here, his trumpet replacing the vocals on numbers from
Miller's repertory, all arranged -- as were the contemporary 1960s numbers such as "Hello, Dolly!," "More," and "Blue Velvet" -- in the authentic
Miller style by band alumnus George Williams. The sound is excellent and the band revels in the stereo profile and high-fidelity recording. Williams and company successfully picture where and how
Miller might well have handled numbers such as "The Girl from Ipanema," as well as how standards from their repertory like "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Pennsylvania 6-5000" could have sounded under
Miller's leadership some 20 years later.
Glenn Miller Time -- 1965 was reissued in 2001 on CD paired with the orchestra's follow-up, Great Songs of the 60's. ~ Bruce Eder