----------It dont mean a thing If it aint got that swing.------------ Windswept House-Irving Mills (born Isadore Minsky; January 16, 1894 – April 21, 1985) was a jazz music publisher and musician, also known by the name of Joe Primrose. Mills died in 1985 in Palm Springs, California and is interred at Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery. Mills was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, but some dispute he was born in Odessa, Russia. His father, Hyman Minsky, was a hat maker and came from Odessa with his wife Sophia Minsky. His father died in 1905, forcing Irving and his brother to work odd jobs including bussing at restaurants, selling wallpaper, and working in the garment industry. By 1910 Mills was listed as a telephone operator. After working various jobs involved with the music world such as Friars, Proctors Theatre, and eventually as a song plugger for Emmet Welsh. He married his wife in 1913 and they relocated to Philadelphia. By 1918 he was working for publisher Leo Feist and his brother Jacob was working as a manager for McCarthy and Fisher. In July 1919 the brothers decided to start Jack Mills Music which would be renamed Mills Music in 1928.The Mills brothers discovered a number of great songwriters, including Sammy Fain, Harry Barris, Gene Austin, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy McHugh, and Dorothy Fields. He greatly advanced and even started a few of the careers of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ben Pollack, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, Will Hudson, Raymond Scott and many others. Although he only sang a little, Irving decided to put together his own studio recording group. He started the group Irving Mills and his Hotsy Totsy Gang with Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Arnold Brillhardt, Arthur Schutt, and Manny Klein. Other variations of his bands featured Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Red Nichols (Mills gave Red Nichols the tag and his Five Pennies.) One of his most significant innovations was the band within a band concept, recording small groups to record hot small group sides for the various dime store labels. He started this in 1928 by arranging for members of Ben Pollacks band to make records under a bewildering array of pseudonyms on dime store labels like Banner, Oriole, Cameo, Domino, Perfect, etc. while Pollack had an exclusive contract with Victor. Quite a number of these dime store small group records are consider major jazz classics by collectors. He printed small orchestrations transcribed off the record, so that non-professional musicians could see how great solos were constructed. This was later done by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and many other bands. In late 1936, with involvement by Herbert Yates of the American Record Corporation, Mills started the Master and Variety labels, which for their short life span were distributed by ARC through their Brunswick and Vocalion label sales staff. (Mills had previously A&Red for Columbia in 1934–36, after ARC purchased the failing label.) Irving signed Helen Oakley Dance to supervise the small group records for the Variety label (35 cents or 3 for $1.00). The Master label sold for 75 cents. From December, 1936, through about September, 1937, an large number of records were issued on these labels (40 were issued on Master and 170 on Variety). Masters best selling artists were Duke Ellington, Raymond Scott, as well as Hudson-De Lange Orchestra, Casper Reardon and Adrian Rollini. Varietys roster included Cab Calloway, Red Nichols, the small groups from Ellingtons band led by Barney Bigard, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart, and Johnny Hodges, as well as Noble Sissle, Frankie Newton, The Three Peppers, Chu Berry, Billy Kyle, and other major and minor jazz and pop performers around New York. For more information, please visit Wikipedia.org, Love History? Please Share and do give our page a LIkE. Thank you. ;)
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 02:44:07 +0000
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