The Men Behind the Music: Jerry Gray
When talking about the Swing Era, I've found it all too easy to concentrate on the obvious personalities - the leaders, the singers, the prominent sidemen - while forgetting that so much of what we remember as the "sound" of a band was due to the men (and a few women) who worked behind the scenes to score so many of those timeless hits.
Would Benny Goodman have launched the Swing Era without Fletcher Henderson's charts? Could Duke Ellington's band have become an American icon without Billy Strayhorn? So, I thought I'd try to remedy my oversight by writing an occasional blog about a few of the arrangers behind the bands' successes. Because two of my favorite leaders are Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller an obvious start would be to look at the career of Jerry Gray, who contributed so much to both bands. (And mea culpa, I confess to plagiarizing myself by borrowing heavily from a Wikipedia entry I wrote a year or so back...)
Jerry Gray was born Generoso Graziano on July 3, 1915 in East Boston, Massachusetts. His father Albert Graziano was a music teacher who began training his son on the violin at age 7. As a teenager he studied with Emanuel Ondricek and was soloist with the Boston Junior Symphony. By age 18 he had already formed his own jazz band and was performing in Boston-area clubs.
In 1936 Gray joined Artie Shaw, then calling himself Art Shaw, and his "New Music" orchestra as first violinist. He studied arranging under Shaw and became a staff arranger a year later. During the next two years he penned some of the band's most popular arrangements, including Carioca, Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise, Any Old Time, and the classic Begin the Beguine.
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Many of his up-tempo arrangements show early evidence of the style that would eventually become his trademark: the melody is broken into two- to four-measure phrases, usually carried by the brass sections, that are repeated with increasing intensity until the song's climax.
In November of 1939 Artie Shaw suddenly broke up his band and moved to Mexico. The next day Glenn Miller called Gray and offered him a job arranging for his band. It was initially a difficult move because Shaw had usually allowed his arrangers great musical latitude, while Miller's own background as an arranger plus his more commercial orientation often led him to second-guess his staff. Jerry gradually found himself more in line with Miller's less-mercurial personality and was allowed more of the freedom that he appreciated. As he later told author George T. Simon, "To me, Glenn's band didn't swing like Artie's. ... But after I made up my mind to accept things as they were, things started to click. ... He was a businessman who appreciated music. ... I may have been happier musically with Artie, but I was happier personally with Glenn."
Jerry's time with the Glenn Miller Orchestra produced many of the most recognizable and memorable recordings of the era. He arranged Elmer's Tune, Moonlight Cocktail, and Chattanooga Choo-Choo among many others, while his compositions included Sun Valley Jump, The Man in the Moon, Caribbean Clipper, Pennsylvania 6-5000 - and his most famous song, A String of Pearls. So many of Gray's pieces became best-sellers that he has been described as more responsible for the band's success than Miller himself, although publicly he always described the relationship as mutually beneficial.
Jerry was again without a job when Miller broke up his band in September 1942 to enter the Army Air Forces. The now-Captain Miller used his connections to have him posted to the Army Air Force Training Command and in early 1943 Jerry rejoined his old boss. Entrenched military bureaucracy halted Miller's initial plans to establish a group of service bands with Gray as coordinator of the arranging staffs. Instead, he became chief arranger for Miller's "Band of the Training Command", known to everyone today as the Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Orchestra.
Jerry's training as a both a violinist and swing arranger served him well with the massive AAF orchestra, which comprised an enlarged dance band and a 21-member string section. He created new arrangements of several of Miller's civilian-band hits, added strings to a modified version of Begin the Beguine that he had written for Artie Shaw, and wrote somewhat looser jazz pieces such as Enlisted Men's Mess. He also co-wrote the famous march version of St. Louis Blues along with Perry Burgett and Ray McKinley.
Two arrangements in particular show the breadth of styles that he was able to contribute: a lush, string-heavy treatment of Fred Fisher's Blue is the Night gave that relatively obscure tune a semi-classical cast, while his punching brass arrangement of Everybody Loves My Baby was perhaps the culmination of the repetitive short-phrasing style he developed with the Shaw band.
Jerry was also the full orchestra's assistant conductor, while Ray McKinley and George Ockner served as seconds-in-command for the dance band and string section, respectively. It fell to Gray to conduct the orchestra's first concert in Paris after Miller's airplane disappeared over the English Channel. When the men returned to the U.S. in 1945 and McKinley left following his discharge, Gray assumed full leadership of the AAF Orchestra until its final performance on November 17 of that year.
Jerry was passed over for the job of leading the postwar "ghost" Glenn Miller Orchestra, reportedly because the Miller Estate felt he did not have the pop-star qualities they wanted in a new leader. Instead they approached Ray McKinley, who was not interested, and finally hired Tex Beneke whose talents as vocalist and lead tenor sax player in Miller's civilian band provided a much more colorful front for the band.
For a while Jerry did radio and studio work in the Los Angeles area, including leading the band on a radio show called Club 15 that featured Dick Haymes. He expressed frustration with musicians who were cashing in on the Miller name even though their connections were tenuous (Ray Anthony) or non-existent (Ralph Flanagan), so in 1949 he accepted a request from Decca Records to lead his own Miller-styled orchestra. The result was what he called "Jerry Gray and the Band of Today", an orchestra featuring his old Miller hits along with new compositions.
| Selections |
| Theme - This Can't Be Love |
| Re-Stringing the Pearls |
| Crazy She Calls Me |
| Sitting by the Window |
| Stormy Weather March |
| Desert Serenade (Theme) |
For a number of years the Gray and Beneke bands co-existed, each staffed by many former Miller musicians plus other well-known performers. The Gray band included Al Klink, Trigger Alpert, Zeke Zarchy, Jimmy Priddy, Ernie Caceres, Bernie Privin, and John Best from the Miller dance bands plus George Ockner, David Sackson, and Harry Katzman from the AAF string section. Most importantly he hired clarinetist Wilbur Schwartz whose unusual broad tone had been so important to the civilian band's reed blend. Hits included the obligatory recreations of Miller classics, new compositions in the Miller style such as Restringing the Pearls, and other distinctive tunes such as Sound Off.
Listening to the Jerry Gray and Tex Beneke orchestras provides an interesting contrast. Jerry was arguably closer in spirit to the Miller legacy but never quite achieved the same level of popularity because he was less of a showman and Decca was no match for RCA's marketing machinery. Tex benefited from greater name recognition and stage presence but was hampered by restrictions placed on him by the Miller Estate both before and after his split with RCA.
Jerry continued to tour with his band in various forms through the 1950s. In 1953 he and Henry Mancini worked together on the biopic The Glenn Miller Story, starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson. In addition to leading his dance band he wrote and arranged for singers such as Vic Damone and released a very un-Miller-oriented LP featuring a full chorus and many of his own compositions.
By the 1960s he had settled in Dallas where he conducted the house band at the Fairmont Hotel. This later band generally featured more modern compositions by Gray and other contemporaries such as Sammy Nestico and Billy Byers. In 1968 he briefly returned to the Miller sound with swing arrangements of contemporary songs for Billy Vaughan's orchestra, including Spanish Eyes, A Walk in the Black Forest, and a very AAF-like treatment of One of Those Songs.
Jerry kept the latter part of his career separate from the many "Miller alumni" bands except for a very brief and apparently unplanned appearance with Tex Beneke. He continued to lead the Fairmont Hotel band into the 1970s before passing away from a heart attack at the comparatively young age of 61.
Jeff Karpinski
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
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. He had not! She is a young lady who will turn 19 in June and who at 14 could knock your socks off! She is without a doubt the best example of how big band and swing transcend the generations. 
