Gil Melle Quintet – January 31 1953
Barry Ulanov: Gil Melle – New Faces – New Sounds Liner Notes – BLP 5020 – 1953
AMONG present-day jazz musicians, the parallel gifts of taste and continuity are sadly lacking. With whatever high harmonic talents they may be provided, however rich their melodic fancy, no matter how handsomely equipped with rhythmic ingenuity, that pleasing pairing — taste and continuity — rarely makes its way into their work. All of this is, of course, to indicate how much these twin values appear in the music of Gil Mellé, how much and how musically.
To hear what I mean, run the opening sides over on your machine, then listen to them all over again. Not only do they achieve beginnings, middles, and ends, each in itself, but they establish a continuity from side to side as well. If you're addicted to jazz titles, you may find the musical meaning expressed in the mixture of scientific nomenclature — seasonal, atomic, astronomical. If you're more interested in the way the music is put together as music, you shouldn't miss the development of ideas from tenor and trombone reflection in October, to spirited byplay between those instruments in Cyclotron, to suggestive rhumba beats in Venus, finally to boppy unison, more or less elated, Under Capricorn. All of it hangs together, that's clear. What's more subtle is the pizzicato guitar figure Tal Farlow plucks so prettily behind the two horns at the beginning of October, the quiet authority of Joe Morello's Latin drumming in Venus, and the easy matching of trombone and tenor sounds in the last of this group.
The musical atmosphere more rigorously follows the lyrical titles in the second quartet of Mellé compositions that it does in the first four. The motivation of this group is suggested, at least, by the cover Gil has designed for his album, with its facile employment of the familiar devices of abstract painting for its design. Within the design, and very much a part of the devices, is the plan of the album — circles made to resemble galaxies of stars — and the names of the pieces that make it up. Similarly, within the design of modern mechanics and the stars and the planets, there is plenty of room for swinging solos, such as Gil's and George Wallington's in Gears and Eddie Bert's in Moons and Sunset and Tal Farlow's in Cyclotron and Capricorn. What you often have, then, is a series of backdrops for solos, or, just as frequently, background music that illustrates its atmospheric themes so well you forget all about listening for solos and pay attention strictly to an overall line, a continuity, a motion forward to a necessary end, all generally accomplished with taste.
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| Gil Melle and Eddie Bert Photo by Francis Wolff |
Taste doesn't some naturally to anybody; in this respect, Gil is anybody. He's a West Coast native who went to hi school in New York City, returned to Hollywood or advanced musical studies and four years of gigging around from 1947 to 1951 (reaching as far south as Tijuana in his jobbing travels) before returning to New York to settle down to arranging, composing, and playing. From the studying and the jobs and the writing came taste, taste for a wide range of effects and resources: polytonality, as in Mars; time against time, as in the waltz against fox-trot beats in Sunset Concerto; fragmentary experiments without any key center, as in October, after the opening figure has spun out. Taste, too, one should add, for the simple and the obvious, as in the well-named, well-scored, well-written Venus, in which Gil relies upon repetition of rhumba patterns almost to monotony and then rescues all with a deft departure from the simple and the obvious in the multiple-key coda.
Gil's influences are more obvious than the devices with which he relieves the monotony—he cites Stan Kenton, Thelonious Monk and the other boppers, Debussy and the other fathers and doctors of the Impressionist school. I should add Hollywood — the tinsel, the romantic, the lush — to Gil's list and then admit my admiration for this youngster's ability to assimilate the simple, the obvious, bop. Impressionism, and Hollywood, and make it all come out fresh and structured and tasteful.
Gil Melle – The Complete Fifties Sessions CD Reissue Liner Notes
I had the privelege of being Alfred's closest friend during that decade and his retirement to a distant land for many years did not diminish our comraderie. One memorable night he called me and asked, as a personal favor to him, to record a modern version of "The Gears. I was truly amazed and flattered, but declined. After my experiences in music it would seem to be a mega step backwards. He was, however, very enthusiastic about my Mindscape album (Blue Note 92168) prior to its release so his concept of an updated version of my first composition was not idle speculation. "Let me think about it" I said. Two days later CNN announced his passing and the new "Gears" was no longer conjecture. The great man's last request was fulfilled and he was, as always, right..." The Gears" is important.
I created many record jackets for Blue Note and clearly I remember the cover on this album set. It was based on a fine photograph taken by Bill Huges during a Christmas concert with my group at Town Hall in New York City (1954). This same unit performed at the worlds first jazz festival at Newport and was billed as the most promising new group of the year. Shortly thereafter, our little band was honored to be one of the very first to be featured at Carnegie Hall in a concert for the people of Israel.
The album Gil Mellé Quintet/Sextet 5020 marked the beginning of Dr. Rudy Van Gelder's career as a recording engineer with Blue Note. I brought Alfred and Rudy together, the beginning of a most celebrated association.
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| Tal Farlow Photo by Francis Wolff |
Blue Note Gil Melle Biography
A true renaissance man, Gil Melle began his career as a post-bop baritone saxophonist who also composed and painted, later branching out into a wide variety of artistic and scientific fields. He abandoned jazz fairly early on in his career, choosing to compose a number of film and television scores and experiment with electronic music instead. Then again, Melle’s music wasn’t strictly jazz — it was a hybrid of jazz, drawn from Duke Ellington in particular, and classical music, which he called “primitive modern.” That “primitive modern” music was on display on a series of albums for Blue Note and Prestige in the late ’50s. Following that series, Melle only released records sporadically, but he kept amazingly busy, composing scores, pioneering electronic music, building specialized computers and synthesizers, painting, piloting, and restoring automobiles and planes, as well as keeping an antiquarian microscopical instrumentation collection.
Melle was born in New York City, where he was raised by a family friend after his parents abandoned him at the age of two. As a child, he began painting (he won several national painting competitions as a preteen) and playing saxophone as a teen. Before he was 16 years old, he was playing several jazz clubs in Greenwich Village. At the age of 19, he signed to Blue Note, becoming the first white musician on the label’s roster. At Blue Note, he released five 10″ records before recording his first full-length 12″ LP, “Patterns in Jazz,” in 1956. In addition to recording and performing jazz, Melle continued with his artwork, and his paintings and sculptures were displayed at several New York galleries; in addition, his art was featured on his own albums, as well as records by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk. Between 1956 and 1957, he recorded three albums for Prestige before deciding to halt his career as a traditional jazz bandleader.
Melle moved to Los Angeles in the ’60s, where he began to compose scores for film and television. Over the next 30 years, he wrote scores for over 125 films. He also began working with electronic music, building his own synthesizers, including (arguably) the first drum machine, and performing with the first all-electronic jazz band, the Electronauts, at the tenth Monterey Jazz Festival. In 1967, he returned to recording with “Tome VI,” an all-electronic jazz album released on Verve. He continued to pioneer electronic music, writing scores for Night Gallery and The Andromeda Strain entirely with synthesizers, which was unheard of at the time. In addition to writing music for films, he composed several symphonies, which he performed with symphony orchestras in Toronto, London, and New Zealand. During the mid-’90s, Melle decided to concentrate on the visual arts, in particular his computer-based digital painting, which drew great acclaim from art critics across America.
Down Beat 3 June 1953 Volume 20 Issue 11
Leonard Bernstein – Leonard Feather Blindfold Test
Gil Melle – October [LB] Well, I wish I didn’t have to rate these in stars . . . it’s so general, it’s not fair—parts of it I like and parts of it I don’t. The arrangement is ghastly, the tune is very self-conscious — pretentious, with this pizzicato business, and trying desperately to be highbrow. The one thing I loved is the part that sounded more like a harp, but is, I suppose, a guitar solo. Doesn't sound like any guitar I ever heard, but it’s a beautiful solo. I take it this isn’t written down, that the guy is improvising. But the written stuff at the beginning and the end is a bore. The performance is good, however—they’re all marvelous players; beautiful sax, even good pizzicato playing, but I just don’t like the piece or what it stands for.
Down Beat 20 May 1953 Volume 20 Issue 10
First four, released and reviewed as 78s, have Eddie Bert, trombone; Joe Manning, vibes; George Washington, piano; Red Mitchell, bass; Max Roach, drums, and Monica Dell, vocal effects.
Quintet sides were cut recently and are of considerably more musical moment. Featuring Eddie Ber (billed as "X. Kentonite") Tal Farlow, Clyde Lombardi, Joe Morello, and no piano, they show great thematic originality. Melle is not content to let himself and his men take solos on trite 12 and 32 bar themes. nor even on such relatively good changes as All the Things You Are. His ideas, verging occasionally into the atonal, are all his own, he has sturdy men around him to prove his potent points. Melle's own tenor work, plus Bert and Farlow solos, the overall construction and conception, make the sort of items that bear many close hearings. (Blue Note 5020)
The American Record Guide August 1953 Volume 19 Issue 12
There is a new disc enlisting the quintet and sextet of Gil Melle (BN-5020). The titles are such as Cyclotron, The Gears, October, Mars and Venus, which gives you an idea. Melle is clearly a young man to be reckoned with, but it is hard to know how. His style, to judge from these essays, assimilates Stan Kenton, Thelonius Monk and Debussy, to mention the most prominent. Maybe the eclectic elements will mutate into something more original, or at least more personal, before too long. In any event Blue Note is due thanks for giving him an audience.
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| Vogue Records Press |
Session Information
Eddie Bert as X. Kentonite, trombone; Gil Melle, tenor sax; Tal Farlow, guitar; Clyde Lombardi, bass; Joe Morello, drums.
Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, January 31, 1953
BN465-4 tk.5, Cyclotron, Blue Note BLP 5020
BN466-2 tk.8, October, Blue Note BLP 5020
BN467-0 tk.10, Under Capricorn, Blue Note BLP 5020
BN468-0 tk.13, Venus, Blue Note BLP 5020
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