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:
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.”
—Judy Garland (1922–1969)