Listening to Prestige 229: Gil Melle

What happened to jazz? it was America's popular music in the 30s, made by big bands that filled dance palaces like Roseland and were presented live over the radio for people to dance at home.

Then all sorts of things happened. The economics of the music business changed. The Petrillo strike of 1942-44 meant that union musicians could not record, but singers, who were not member of the American Federation of Musicians, could, and suddenly the singer, formerly an adjunct to the big band that was

the featured attraction, became the star. Frank Sinatra or Doris Day or Jo Stafford were big enough draws on their own--they no longer needed the name of Tommy Dorsey or Harry James. Margaret Whiting, who came of age in the 40s, was remembered later in her career as a big band singer, but actually she never sang with a band.

The record companies thought that the new breed of singer didn't need to compete with jazz soloists and jazz arrangers, and they were probably right. Jazz purists of the 50s, while sort of grudgingly recognizing that Frank Sinatra was a pretty good singer, grumbled that he would only reach his full potential if he sang with jazz musicians. But later, in his third career, with Reprise Records, he did sing with jazz musicians, and today everyone pretty much agrees that the Capitol recordings, with Nelson Riddle and Billy May creating arrangements that directed all the focus to the singer, are his greatest. Margaret Whiting did make her most successful records with a  jazz great, Billy Butterfield, but Butterfield understood his role and performed it beautifully.

And jazz was moving away from the dance music of the 30s to the challenging, intellectually stimulating sound of bebop.

This was, of course, going to narrow the audience. There are always going to be more people who want to dance than to be intellectually stimulated. But if jazz had lost the Dionysian excitement of the dance palace, it was creating a new kind of excitement, and that was not entirely Apollonian. Jazz was adventurous, it was on the cutting edge/ With its new emphasis on the virtuoso soloist it offered the unparalleled excitement of being up close and personal to a creative artist at the moment of creativity.

And modern jazz had an edge of danger, as it morphed from the music of the bobby soxer to the music of the hipster (the real hipster, not these guys in pony tails selling designer chocolate). It was Jack Kerouac on the road, it was Anatomy of a Murder and  Peter Gunn. Another shot-lived TV show brought the jazz-danger connection even closer, with John Cassavetes playing Johnny Staccato, a jazz pianist/private eye.

And of course, it was dangerous because it was black. All American music, even country and western, has its roots in the blues, but modern jazz was different. It was made by black musicians who consciously rejected the role of entertaining the white folks. If you wanted to listen to modern jazz, you had to go out and meet the black experience on its own terms, in the thorny personae of Charlie Parker or Charles Mingus or Miles Davis.

Or not. Jazz was a small niche in a world made by white men, as Miles Davis found out one summer evening when he had just finished recording what would be the best selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue, and was playing a gig at Birdland.

I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bullshit. I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. At the time I was doing a lot of boxing and so I thought to myself, I ought to hit this motherfucker because I knew what he was doing. But instead I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,” and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.

He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.”

I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, “You’re under arrest!” He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back. Now, boxers had told me that if a guy’s going to hit you, if you walk toward him you can see what’s happening. I saw by the way he was handling himself that the policeman was an ex-fighter. So I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head. He stumbled, and all his stuff fell on the sidewalk, and I thought to myself, Oh, shit, they’re going to think that I fucked with him or something. I’m waiting for him to put the handcuffs on, because all his stuff is on the ground and shit. Then I move closer so he won’t be able to fuck me up. A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on.  Then I remember [journalist] Dorothy Kilgallen coming outside with this horrible look on her face — I had known Dorothy for years and I used to date her good friend, Jean Bock — and saying, “Miles, what happened?” I couldn’t say nothing. Illinois Jacquet [the saxophonist] was there, too.

It was almost a race riot, so the police got scared and hurried up and got my ass out of there and took me to the 54th Precinct where they took pictures of me bleeding and shit. So, I’m sitting there, madder than a motherfucker, right? And they’re saying to me in the station, “So you’re the wiseguy, huh?” Then they’d bump up against me, you know, try to get me mad so they could probably knock me upside my head again. I’m just sitting there, taking it all in, watching every move they make.

If you were white, and a modern jazz fan, you felt a closeness to that abyss--it could happen to you, too. Though, of course, it couldn't. And I'm not putting down white jazz fans of the 50s. I was one. Just saying there was a jazz culture that it felt exciting to be a part of.

And al that would change too. Not the racism, but the perception of jazz. Most art forms follow a pattern: folk art to popular art to high art. Jazz did it faster than most, but that's the pattern. I was going to say "follow an arc," and in a way that's right: the middle stage is the apex of popularity. But one could equally call it a trajectory: as an art form matures, it gains, subtlety, complexity, richness. Or so one hopes. But anyway, it can't stand still. Nothing can.

Perhaps the handwriting started to appear on the wall when Benny Goodman played Carnegie Hall instead of the Palladium. Certainly it was growing bolder on that same wall when John Lewis and his cohorts put on tuxedos and called themselves the Modern Jazz Quartet, a name that demanded serious attention in the way that Miff Mole and his Little Molers or Terry Gibbs New Jazz Pirates or J. J. Johnson's Boppers did not.

Anyway, the progress was inexorable: out of the raffish smoke-filled clubs, out of the mob-controlled joints where Louis Armstrong played in Chicago, out of 52nd Street where jazz groups alternated with strippers, into the concert hall, and into Jazz at Lincoln Center. It had to happen, and jazz is the better for people like Wynton Marsalis and the foundations that keep jazz alive.

All of which is a free-flying digression, pushing the limits even for me, and I've probably said a lot of it before. I promise I will get to Gil Melle eventually. But there's a reason why it's on my mind now, and that is that all of this is simply history repeating itself, as I discovered when reading a fascinating book, The Romantic Revolution by Tim Blanning.

The same thing was happening in the18th century. Just as the hipsters and beatniks of the 40s and 50s dismissed the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey fans as moldy figs, so the avant garde of that era, the aficionados of the new, challenging music made by people like Franz Lizst dismissed the fans of Gioachino Rossini's wildly popular operas as Philistines.

And then, as now, an element of fun was fading. Blanning quotes Fanny Burney's eponyous heroine Evelina:

About eight o'clock we went to the Pantheon. I was extremely struck by the beauty of the building, which greatly surpassed anything I could have expected or imagined. Yet, it has more the appearance of a chapel, than a place of diversion, and though I was quite charmed by the magnificence of the room, I felt that I could not be as gay and thoughtless there as at Ranelagh [a pleasure garden], for there is something in it which rather inspires awe and solemnity, than mirth and pleasure.

So, getting back to the subject at hand. Does Gil Melle inspire awe and solemnity, or mirth and

pleasure? Melle was working out of a slightly different pushcart than some of his contemporaries, although not entirely different. His rhythm section was made up of mainstream jazzers, and you don't include two Ellington compositions, particularly "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," if you're planning to do something really weird. Melle, like Teddy Charles, kept one foot in the avant garde and one in the mainstream.

His avant garde foot was mostly set down later, when he moved to Hollywood, indulged his fascination with electronic instruments, and began writing movie TV scores. In that capacity, he was one of those who changed the musical voice of suspense for soundtracks. Just as Ennio Morricone completely upended the Dmitri Tiomkin (out of Ferde Grofe) convention for scoring a Western, so the electronic composers replaced jazz scores as the motif for suspense, Melle would write the music for TV series Kolchak: the Night Stalker and Rod Serling's Night Gallery.

This stands more on the mainstream foot, with some surprises."Walter Ego" begins with what could almost be a Gerry Mulligan arrangement. As an instrumentalist, Melle was no Mulligan or Pepper Adams, and he knew it, but he was a brilliant musical mind, and "Walter Ego" soon goes in surprising different directions.

As much as Melle would become known later for his film scores, "Rush Hour in Hong Kong" was not an audition for a movie to be made twenty years later, though it almost could have been. And his version of "It Don't Mean a Thing" really does swing, with outstanding solos from George Duvivier and Shadow Wilson in addition to Joe Cinderella.

"Quadrama" became the title song for the album.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige 204: Gil Melle

Gene Ammons getting funky. Now, that makes sense. But...Gil Mellé?

Well, maybe funk for star people is a little different. Maybe it varies from asteroid to asteroid. Or maybe Mellé really is getting funky. Or maybe some combination of all of the above.

Mellé was getting ready to leave for Hollywood, and beyond: the Andromeda galaxy, and next stop...the Twilight Zone (or at least Rod Serling's Night Gallery). But meanwhile, he was still in New York, still in Hackensack, still doing a Friday with Rudy, and still working with some of the best jazz musicians New York had to offer.

Unfortunately, if he was planning to take this album with him as a keepsake to remember New York by, it was not to happen. The session was never released until many years later, as bonus tracks on the CD reissue of Gil's Guests. And because that CD threw together three different sessions with different musicians, these tracks are generally credited to Gil Mellé with Donald Byrd and Phil Woods, neither of whom actually appear on them.

But not to worry, there are plenty of great musicians, and guys who could get funky. Mellé follows his earlier formula of billing the session as a quartet plus guests, although actually the guests are more familiar to a Mellé session than half of the quartet. Art Farmer has appeared before as a Gil's Guest, and so has Hal McKusick (twice). Seldon Powell, primarily a rhythm and blues player, provides plenty of funk (and as jazz got funkier, he would be called on more and more for jazz sessions).

Teddy Charles provides the intergalactic balance, cool and clear and distant, particularly on "Golden Age."

Joe Cinderella is back as Mellé's right hand man, but the bass and drums are new--to Mellé, that is. Certainly not to jazz. And they are very much of this earth, rooted to the roots of jazz. They also aren't guys you'd grab up because they were just hanging around the studio, or because you'd seen their names on other Prestige sessions (although Shadow Wilson had done three, with Tadd Dameron, Earl Coleman and Sonny Stitt). Mellé must have given these selections a lot of thought, and reached out for players who had those roots. Wilson went back to the rhythm and blues of Lucky Millinder and Tiny Bradshaw, and the big band swing of Earl Hines, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie, although he was only 40 when he died, two years later, of a heroin overdose.

George Duvivier also went back to Lucky Millinder and Cab Calloway, although he made perhaps his

greatest mark with his 1953 recordings as a member of Bud Powell's trio. New to Prestige, he would be back with the label, and with funk, as the bassist on a number of Gene Ammons' recordings. It's hard to overestimate what he contributes here. He swings, he funks, he solos.

All the compositions are Mellé's, of course. He was looking very much in his own direction, and he wasn't going to find it improvising on the chord changes to "Stella by Starlight." He wasn't particularly an improviser either, and his future didn't lie in jazz, but he was drawn to jazz for a reason, and that included using gifted improvisers like Art Farmer.

Mellé was a very talented guy. He was a graphic artist, an inventor of electronic instruments, a composer. Jazz is a demanding mistress It's not an art that you dabble in, and a jack-of-all-trades isn't necessarily going to be able to pull it off. But Mellé did. He made a contribution to the music. And he discovered Rudy Van Gelder.

No picture of the album cover this time, since this session only became a years-later afterthought to a CD reissue. It deserved better.

 Order Listening to Prestige, Vol. 1 here.

Listening to Prestige Part 185: Gil Melle

Gil Melle is back in Hackensack two Fridays later, once again trying the experiment of adding three horns to his quartet. The added personnel is a little different this time, perhaps because Art Farmer and Julius Watkins were tied up, perhaps because he still wanted to tinker with the septet sound. Certainly he seems to have had no problems with Farmer, because he brought him back for a 1957 session.

Hal McKusick is back, but Kenny Dorham has replaced Farmer, and Don Butterfield's tuba is in for Watkins's French horn. The result is weirder, and arguably better. Art Farmer brought his own brand of magic to the ensemble, and when he soloed, it became an Art Farmer session. And Lord knows, there's nothing wrong with that. But Kenny Dorham seems to grasp Melle's unique sensibility right away. McKusick has really learned it by this time, and the two of them move from ensemble parts to solos with a full grasp that this is going in a different direction: not a bebop session, or even a hard bop session. That perhaps it's more akin to something that doesn't exist yet: the electronic music that Melle will go on to create.

Don Butterfield for Julius Watkins, tuba for French horn, is an interesting choice, and an inspired one.

Melle had set a deep bottom with his baritone sax, but Butterworth goes deeper and fuller, and in his solos takes Melle's ideas even farther than Melle does.

Butterfield, by 1956, had made the transformation from classical orchestras (and the orchestrated cocktail music to which Jackie Gleason put his name, but not much of anything else) to jazz, and he became a solid part of the jazz scene throughout the 50s and 60s, with beboppers like Dizzy Gillespie, Art Farmer and Jimmy Heath, with funksters like Jimmy Smith, with experimenters like Charles Mingus, Teddy Charles and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, with one-foot-in jazz composers like David Amram -- and I suppose Gil Melle could be included in that last category. In any event, his contribution to this album is inestimable.

All three compositions are unique. Each finds its own direction, and the musicians all find their way along each path. "Sixpence" has actually a sort of head-solo-solo-head structure, but it's not exactly your Uncle Charlie's head-solo-solo-head structure, nor do the musicians treat it as such.

This session completed the tracks for what became the Gil's Guests album. He would record one more album for Prestige, again in two separate sessions, one with guests and one without, and the session with guests was added to the later CD reissue.




Order Listening to Prestige Vol 1: 1949-1963 from Amazon.

Listening to Prestige Part 183: Gil Melle

Art Farmer shows up for an afternoon with the usual Fridays at Rudy's gang to find...

What???

Yes, this is a different sort of Friday. And you have to wonder if this is exactly what Gil Melle was expecting, for that matter, from the name hung on the ensemble. Here's the quartet, and what exactly are we going to do with these other guys?

He probably wasn't taken by surprise. Art Farmer may have been a Rudy's regular, but Julius Watkins and Hal McKusick weren't. In any case, whether he came prepared or had to arrange on the fly, he came up with some interesting arrangements, particularly on "Block Island."

As a baritone sax player, Gil Melle was no Gerry Mulligan. If anything, he was Mulligan's renegade stepbrother. He was probably more interested in the tonal qualities of the baritone sax than he was in improvisation. So how is it that the arrangement on "Block Island" sounds so much like Mulligan? Or the bizarro Mulligan. Or Mulligan's evil twin.

All the musicians on this session are good. One of the things we have Melle to thank for, in addition to The Andromeda Strain, would be giving Joe Cinderella a chance to be heard on one of the important jazz labels.

Vinnie Burke is the newcomer to Melle's quartet. Burke was a solid professional, a guitarist/violinist who had taken up the bass after mangling his little finger on the assembly line at a munitions factory. Through the 40s and 50s he played with a range of musicians, many of them, like Bucky Pizzarelli, the Sauter-Finnegan Orchestra and Marian McPartland, on the not so far out end of the scale. Of course, the same was true of Ed Thigpen, and both of them worked well with Melle. Burke's career would extend well into the 80s, and he could always get work.

Hal McKusick got his start with two bandleaders who were more forward-thinking than a lot of their 1940s dance band contemporaries, Boyd Raeburn and Claude Thornhill. They may have given him a taste for challenging assignments, because he went on to work with the likes of Gunther Schuller,

George Russell, Lee Konitz and John Coltrane. He also co-led a group with Bill Evans in 1958.

But the top soloist here is Farmer. Melle gives him his head, and he contributes some remarkable stuff.

These three cuts went onto an album called Gil's Guests, which also featured, in later sessions, Kenny Dorham, Don Butterfield and Zoot Sims.

Listening to Prestige Part 173: Gil Melle

Gil Melle is probably best known to jazz history as the guy who introduced Rudy Van Gelder to Blue Note's Alfred Lion. The session never made it to wax, but the recording quality was good enough to draw Lion, and then Bob Weinstock, out to Hackensack.

Melle did eventually record several albums for Blue Note, and a few for Prestige, starting with this one, recorded in two sessions. I wasn't able to listen to any of the April tracks, so I'm getting to the whole album here.

Melle was multi-talented, a graphic artist as well as musician.

Album cover art by Gil Melle

His work was shown in New York galleries, and he designed a number of jazz album covers. His career at this time could be compared to that of Pop artist Larry Rivers, but Rivers was an artist first and a jazz hobbyist; Melle's main focus was music, although he also continued to paint  all of his life, and he eventually moved to the West Coast, where he launched a successful career as a composer of film and TV scores, including The Andromeda Strain and Rod Serling's Night Gallery. The theme music for the 1970 TV show was the first ever to use all electronic instrument, and The Andromeda Strain, in 1971, was probably the first all-electronic movie score.

This quartet session for Prestige uses all traditional instruments, but listening to it, it's not surprising that Melle would grow fascinated with electronic instruments, designing and building many of them himself, and presenting the first ever all-electronic jazz ensemble at the 1967 Monterey Jazz Festival. He's more concerned, especially in "Dominica," with tonal quality, and at first listen, one wonders if he's trying too hard, and intellectualizing the process too much.

On subsequent plays, however,the music becomes much more rewarding, and the ensemble is remarkable.

It's also a little puzzling. The Jazzdisco set list has Melle playing baritone and alto sax, and Bill Phipps playing bass. But Phipps was a baritone sax man, so it could be that he is, in fact, the one on baritone. If he's not, Melle is double-tracking himself, and given his interest in electronic sounds, that's certainly possible. but I think not likely.

So let's give Phipps the credit for some intriguing baritone sax work,  and move on to him, as one of an ensemble of little-known (except for Ed Thigpen) and fascinating musicians.

Except for his work with Melle, Bill Phipps wasn't much of an avant-gardist, although he did once lead a band that featured Grachan Moncur. In fact, he came from a jazz family that was deeply rooted in the tradition. His cousins Ernie and Eugene led a band called the Monarchs of Swing. He and his brother Nat cp-led the group that featured Moncur and Wayne Shorter, and Bill later played with such earthy ensembles as Ray Charles' and Brother Jack McDuff's.

But here with Melle, he understands the demands of the avant garde, and delivers.

Joe Cinderella delivers more than his share, especially on "Ballet Time," my favorite of the set. It also has Melle's strongest soloing.

Where did Melle come up with these guys? Every one of them, it seems, has at least one toe in both the mainstream and avant garde. How avant garde was Joe Cinderella? He worked with John Cage. Avant garde enough for you?  He also worked with Warne Marsh. On the mainstream side of jazz, he worked with Conte Candoli, and deeper into the mainstream of American music, he played on sessions with the Beach Boys and Billy Joel. He's pretty much forgotten today, but he's worth seeking out.

Ed Thigpen is certainly the best known musician in this quartet. Mostly known for his mainstream work with Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor and Ella Fitzgerald, he also played with Lennie Tristano, who is the godfather of the sort of music Melle plays. He's also from a musical family -- his father played with Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy.

This album was released, for reasons best known to Gil Melle, as Melle Plays Primitive Modern.