Joseph Copeland "Joe" Garland (Aug. 15, 1903, Norfolk, Virginia - April 21, 1977, Teaneck, New Jersey) was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and arranger, best known for writing "In the Mood".
Garland studied music at Shaw University and the Aeolian Conservatory. He started by playing classical music but joined a jazz band, Graham Jackson's Seminole Syncopators, in 1924, where he first recorded. He had a long run of associations as a sideman on saxophone and clarinet, with Elmer Snowden (1925), Joe Steele, Henri Saparo, Leon Abbey (including a tour of South America), Charlie Skeete and Jelly Roll Morton in the 1920s. The 1930s saw him playing with Bobby Neal (1931) and the Mills Blue Rhythm Band; he was both a performer and an arranger for the Blue Rhythm Band from 1932 to 1936, when Lucky Millinder replaced him. Following this he played with Edgar Hayes (1937), Don Redman (1938), and Louis Armstrong (1939-42). In the 1940s he played with Claude Hopkins and others, and then returned to Armstrong's band from 1945-47. Following this he played with Herbie Fields, Hopkins again, and Earl Hines (1948). In the 1950s, he went into semi-retirement.
Garland wrote a number of well-known swing jazz hits, including the Glenn Miller hit "In the Mood" (first performed and discarded by bandleaders Charlie Barnet and Artie Shaw). He also wrote "Serenade To A Savage" for Shaw (one of Shaw's gold records) and Les Brown's "Leap Frog".
Famous quotes containing the words joe and/or garland:
“While we were thus engaged in the twilight, we heard faintly, from far down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopper’s axe, echoing dully through the grim solitude.... When we told Joe of this, he exclaimed, “By George, I’ll bet that was a moose! They make a noise like that.” These sounds affected us strangely, and by their very resemblance to a familiar one, where they probably had so different an origin, enhanced the impression of solitude and wildness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.”
—Judy Garland (1922–1969)