Irving Mills(1894-1985)

Irving Mills was a composer, song publisher and band and orchestra manager in the 1920s and 1930s and also manager for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1920s and early 1930s he would put together bands for recordings. One of his bands that recorded for Brunswick Records from 1928 to 1930 was called Irving Mills And His Hotsy Totsy Gang and used a collective personnel that had some of the best white jazz musicians of the period in its ranks including Benny Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Jack Teagarden, Hoagie Carmichael and Joe Venuti among others. He sometimes used Black trumpeter Bill Moore, who had played and recorded with the California Ramblers from 1922 to 1925 who was very light-skinned and was billed as the Hot Hawiian and predated Jelly-Roll Morton in recording with white bands and orchestras. Irving Mills stayed active in the music business into the 1970s and though listed as co-composer on some of the 1920s and early 1930s sheet music and recordings of music composed by Duke Ellington, he most likely had little or nothing to do with composing them.