In 1940, 17-year-old Lee Evers interviewed the big band leader Glenn Miller at New York City’s Paramount Theatre for a story in his high school newspaper, The Monroe Mirror. Eighty-one years since Miller’s death in 1944, Evers — now 102 years old— will hear the music live again at the Academy of Music in Northampton.
In his Montague home last week, Evers described using his school-issued press pass to have some fun and explore the 1940s New York jazz scene.
“There were just bands playing everywhere in those days … I saw [Miller] at the Paramount and I went to interview him afterwards. It was not a celebrity occasion, because they were just hard working guys.”
When he met Miller, Evers said he climbed a pile of chairs at the Paramount Theatre to get a better view of him. He said the musician carried himself with a relaxed demeanor.
“I climbed up to look down at him, and he walks out of this back room. And I can see in the back room there were like 20 musicians with instruments. This young man comes down, a very clean cut, slender guy, just sort of tall – it’s Glenn Miller, and he’s all sweated up,” Evers said. “He had a T-shirt on. I always pictured him always standing in front of the band in his tuxedo … he looks up at me and says ‘get down from there.'”
Reading his interview notes from a yellow legal pad, Evers recounted what he had taken away from his conversation – that Miller was born in Iowa and went to college in Colorado before promptly dropping out, as he had failed three of the subjects he was studying.
Miller told Evers that he learned trombone as an adolescent from a man who played cards with his father, a farmer, and quickly became “intrigued by the instrument.” Playing in small bands during the great depression, Evers said Miller discovered a love for clarinet, the instrument he considers to be a trademark of Miller’s sound.
“One day, he said, he got an urge to try an experiment mixing a clarinet in with the saxophones, and the sound that came out was very gentle and loving, and that became the premise of his band, and it became enormously successful because of this one idea,” Evers said. “There’s a beauty to it, a depth to the sound. He ended up playing in bigger and bigger bands and eventually became famous for that sound.”
Before Miller went missing in action in 1944, while serving in the Air Force Officer during World War II, Evers said he saw his band play a few times, though the two never talked after that brief interview.
Evers, too, served in World War II as a corporal in the fifth Bomber Command, where he earned five battle stars, though he said “one battle is enough to drive you crazy.” He was drafted roughly two years after his interview with Miller.
Although the ensemble comprises none of its original members, Evers looks forward to seeing the Glenn Miller Orchestra live Aug. 20 — an experience that he said will likely take him back to memories the 1940s.
“It will probably be touching to be there, because it’ll bring me back to memories of when I was 17 years old,” he said.
