It took 45 years, but we finally have a release of this album the way it was supposed to be! BMG, with the diligent help of AAF Band collector and scholar Ed Polic, have brought back the recordings from the original 5-LP set of 1956 along with nearly two dozen additional selections not included in that landmark album. It's a treasure - the liner notes provide recording dates and locations, personnel changes and other information absent from the original release. But more importantly, the CDs reverse what can only be described as tampering on the LP release. You can once again hear Glenn Miller's and announcer Don Briggs' introductions and audience reactions that were removed from the 1956 set, and the medleys are as originally performed rather than being spliced together from unrelated broadcasts.

The fidelity on all but a few of these 60-year-old recordings is amazing. There are new performances of several of Miller's civilian band hits, experimental pieces such as Mel Powell's concerto "Pearls on Velvet", and lush pop songs featuring the full 21-member string section and Johnny Desmond's smooth vocals. With the added ambience of the restored introductions and thunderous applause from the audience, there's a new sense of what it must have been like to listen to this phenomenal orchestra "live and in person"!

If you buy this album, I'd also suggest complementing it with the other two significant boxed sets of AAF Band recordings which have appeared in the last few years, since each one presents the orchestra from a somewhat different perspective.

Many of the tracks on this album were recorded somewhat earlier in the band's existence, in mid- to late 1943. The performances are by and large either taken from live broadcasts or remote concerts, and there is a spontaneity that few bands seemed to be able to match in the studio. If you think you know "In the Mood", just listen to it on this album! On the other hand, there are some missteps - a dropped note here and there, and some programming lapses (what WAS the Major thinking when he selected "Mother Machree"??? Paging Lawrence Welk!) - but they all add to the sense of "being there".

The other two sets I'd recommend are The Secret Broadcasts, studio recordings done in the spring of 1944, and The Lost Recordings, made in the UK in late 1944. The musicians were probably at their most cohesive during that early 1944 period, and it shows in a range of performances extending from Ellingtonian jazz to serious classical works. The UK recordings are noteworthy because you can hear how the orchestra was evolving towards the new style and repertory that would have kept Glenn Miller in the forefront of popular music, if only ....

GLENN MILLER's Army Air Force Orchestra at it's BEST!!!!

WELL DONE BMG!!!! THE GREATEST GLENN MILLER ORCHESTRA EVER and restored as it was broadcast during 1943 to 1944. THIS IS THE ORCHESTRA THAT GAVE THE G.I's in Europe That much needed "HUNK O' HOME"...... THIS MUSIC & GLENN's memory will never die.....

THIS CD set should be an ALL TIME BEST SELLER!!!!!!!!!!

(...)

The Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band was far and away the best band that Miller ever fronted, and the evidence of that is overwhelming on these four discs. What clinches it for me is the version of "Star Dust," where the combination of strings and Miller's trademark reed section is absolutely breathtaking. This would have been the sound that Miller would have carried back to the US with him had he lived, and in my opinion the Big Band era would not have died as quickly. This is a must for any collection!

On the back of a lot of usual hype, I question the worthiness of this re-release. Sure, we now get all the dialogue and the medleys have been "restored" but to the casual listener, this will not not be especially important or even relevant or noticeable. The dialogue is actually distracting and hardly worthy of the addition. Do you need to hear Miller introduce each song in his slow drawl? What purpose can it serve? There is a distinctive air of arrogance over the whole proceedings and this restoration of the original set - the assumption that a commercially minded record company got it all completely wrong back in 1956 and only now with the help of pedantic collectors and rather dry musical historians and academics, can we now be fully treated to Miller in his undoubted prime. Nonsense, I say.

I think this is yet another example of authoritative collectors / historians bullying to get what they want. Most listeners will not easily recognise the difference between any one of a dozen versions of any particular song recorded between 1943 and 1945 so I would have hoped for a researcher to perhaps put together a definitive catalogue of every Miller / AAF song in ONE set by now and be done with it. This has not happened. We've all been "sold" the merits of the Conifer issues: The Lost Recordings and The Secret Broadcasts (2 CD and 3 CD sets respectively)as well as the Avid series: The Missing Chapters (12 Cd's over 9 titles). Now with this 4 CD set, we're expected to lap up even more. How many versions do we all want of any particular song? How many CD sets are we supposed to buy? Do any of them actually sound any better than others or will we be experiencing deja vu again?

As to the merits of this release, I have to take issue with a previous reviewer who claims that these recordings are predominantly from 1943. A quick count through will quickly reveal that the majority of these recordings actually come from 1944 and as well as effectively duplicating the aforementioned releases in song terms, they are also culled from the same time frame leaving the early 1943 period still relatively unmined.

I would seriously object to paying the extortionate prices that most Marketpace sellers are asking for this set. It's simply not worth it. What happened to the beautiful padded album enveloping the original 5 LP set? Here we get a basic, no frills, thin card carton with a small book inside. Hardly fitting for the "ultimate" version of this album, is it?

Another bone of contention is the remastering. I've read an awful lot about "24-bit remastering" and "taken from the original sources" etc but quite honestly this set falls behind the 1995 release of the Secret Broadcasts in sound quality terms. The signal to noise ratio is quite low and the whole set exhibits an uncomfortable amount of tape hiss and scratchy unpleasantness. Compared to the clean crisp sound of Conifer's releases (the less said about Avid the better) this BMG set sounds like the poor cousin. It also suffers from the same problem as most post-1998 "remastered" releases: that of being burdened with a high amount of compression in order to achieve some notional quota of volume as dictated by record companies. My 1987 RCA Bluebird compilation actually sounds a lot better.

And what exactly is it about Miller-philes that they don't ever acknowledge each others efforts to compile and present earlier releases of material? If you care to part with a few hundred dollars to buy this, maybe you'll automatically be enlisted in the Glenn Miller Society who will bestow heaps of biographical and historical recording information on you? There has surely got to be one release which explains why it compiles material from a different source to another issue? And explain what the significance of a specific recording session was for?

This isn't it. If you simply want to hear the ultimate Miller band at the peak of their powers AND JUST TO ENJOY THE MUSIC, you need to keep waiting and hoping for something better to come along, sorry to say.