I hate to burst your bubbles, whipper snappers, but the best popular music of all time was in the 1930's. Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and of course Frank Sinatra.
Glenn Miller doesn't belong in the same area cose, never mind mention, as Duke Ellington. (Well,
nobody
really does.) Or Count Basie and Benny Goodman, who should have been on the aforequoted
list, too. I like some of Miller's music but he wasn't even close to their league.
The best parts of Ellington, Fitzgerald, Satchmo, the Count, and the King of Swing? They never forgot the
blues. (If you could hear some of the sides Armstrong cut blowing for Bessie Smith you'd be
amazed with a capital A.) And neither did future jazzmen as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian (died way too
young), Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, John Lewis, Milt Jackson, John Coltrane,
Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Giuffre, Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, Oliver Nelson, and the Adderley brothers, to
name a few.
Come to think of it, the performance that kick-started Duke Ellington's remarkable comeback in the mid-1950s?
A blues!
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue"Glenn Miller was puppy chow compared to
that . . .