The Worlds of Mel Powell by Gene Lees

Much was made of the fact that Mel Powell was 17 years old when he joined the Benny Goodman band as pianist and arranger. Given the long history of prodigies – Mendelssohn wrote his Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream at 16 – perhaps too much. Certainly too much was made of the fact that he had an extensive “classical” training in both piano and composition, as if he were the first of his breed to enter jazz. Almost all the better jazz pianists had solid academic training, whether formal or self-imposed.

What is more remarkable is that Mel Powell should have cast so long a shadow in the jazz world when his career in the idiom was comparatively brief. He worked with Goodman in 1941 and 1942, and, bored with playing the same material night after night, left the band in the late summer of 1942, not yet 20. His compositions for the Goodman band, not to mention his charts – the arrangements of “Jersey Bounce” and “A String of Pearls” are his – are part of the legacy of the big-band era, along with his dazzling piano solos in both the big band and the Goodman chamber subgroups.

Powell eventually became head of the composition department of the school of music of the California Institute of the Arts, called CalArts. When he was in his 60s, he contracted a neurological disorder that caused him to move about on an electric tricycle. When he struggled to his feet and supported himself with canes, he was still a little over six feet. His hair was plentiful, but faded from the blond of his youth to a silky white.

This is an extensive piece and covers much more than Mel’s unique approach to Jazz piano and that’s because, as you will see, Mel was also a composer and arranger and a brilliant educator.

One of the hallmarks of Gene’s lengthy interviews which he published in his annual Jazzletter until his death in 2010 was an informed dialogue with the person he was interviewing. Gene was a highly literate individual and when he found a musician who was as knowledgeable as he was on a variety of subjects with which they shared a common interest, a wide-ranging dialogue ensued.

Sadly, Mel Powell is long-forgotten today, but this piece is a fitting tribute to his memory.

© Copyright ® Gene Lees, copyright protected, all rights reserved, used with the permission of the author.

“Very often in the class,” he said in a cultivated, sonorous teacher’s voice, “we’ll be talking something technical, say, Renaissance, and I’ll point out certain syncopations, and then I will say, ‘That’s very much like what happens in jazz.’ And at the end of the lesson, a student will say, ‘Mr. Powell, how come you know that much about jazz?’ I’ll come back and say, The right question is, “How come I know so much about the Renaissance?”‘ Then I tell them about my past.

“And they are stunned.”

Mel’s concerto for two pianos was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and won the Pulitzer Prize. Soon thereafter his malady, inclusionary polymyositis, caused him to take a fall, cracking his head so severely that he was hospitalized in a coma. For a long period of his recovery he was unable to speak, and when the ability was restored to him, he quipped to Peggy Lee, still his friend nearly 50 years after their service in the Goodman band, “It’s a good thing I didn’t win the Nobel Prize!”

He was born Melvin Epstein in the Bronx on 12 February 1923, which, being Lincoln’s birthdate as well, meant that he never had to go to school on that day.

His father, Milton Epstein, and mother, nee Mildred Mark, were both from Russia. His maternal grandfather, who lived with the family, was a Talmudic scholar. Mel’s father spent a period of his youth as a professional boxer, but abandoned boxing for the jewelry business and, with the advent of the Depression, became a traveling salesman. Then Mel’s parents were divorced, which was very unusual in Jewish families. Mel was the youngest of three children. He had a sister, Elinor, and a brother, Lloyd, four years his senior.

I mentioned to Mel that Glenn Gould never practiced: “He told me that if a piece presented some particular digital problem, he might go to the piano to work out the fingering in that passage. But otherwise, he thought the music through, and then just went and did it. A friend of mine said that if you build your technique early, it stays with you, but if you build it later, you have to work hard to keep it.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Mel said. “I’ve always thought I was fortunate in having begun so early.”

“How early?”

“Four, five, with piano lessons. With a very stern German lady named Sara Barg, who’d slap you and all that. But I appreciated that later. And then, as far as my work in composition is concerned, I was delighted that she spoke sometimes like a theorist, rather than a piano teacher. She would say things like, ‘No, no, no! Be sure to show the sub-dominant!’ That was nice. Learning by rote can ruin you.”

Mel grew up in a building on 161st Street in the Bronx, so situated that from its roof one could look down into Yankee Stadium. People would gather there for a free view of games, and Mel showed a brief entrepreneurial spirit by selling them peanuts.

Mel won a third prize in a city-wide contest for young pianists and was advised by Walter Damrosch to go to Germany to study. But his brother Lloyd had already turned him on to jazz. The family had moved, when Mel was about 11, south to West End Avenue at 102nd Street. Lloyd and Mel would listen to remote broadcasts of the bands during the time when Mel was going to De Witt Clinton High School. Later he went to City College of New York, where he majored in French.

When Mel was 13, Lloyd got him to go to the Paramount theater to see the Benny Goodman band. Mel was mesmerized by its polish and precision and the playing of Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson. Soon he was listening on records to Art Hodes, Jess Stacy, Bix Beiderbecke, Fats Waller, and, most significantly, Earl Hines. A friend took him to Nick’s in Greenwich Village, where he heard Sidney Bechet, Bobby Hackett, and Zutty Singleton. One night he asked, with precocious courage, to sit in. A man sitting near the piano told him, “You’re going to be a real one.” It was Art Tatum. Soon Mel had a job at Nick’s, working with Brad Gowans, Pee Wee Russell, and Eddie Condon.

One night Dorothy Parker and John Steinbeck, both jazz devotees, came into Nick’s. She had already had a good deal to drink. A man approached their table, sat down, and began talking. She stared at him through fog until he felt the chill. He said, somewhat testily, “I guess you don’t remember me.”

“My memory,” she said, “is so bad that I don’t remember asking you to sit down.”

Mel added: “That’s not a story. I was there.”

At one point he worked opposite a young pianist from Chicago, two or three years his senior, with whom he became friends: Nat Cole. “I think we were both influenced by the same people,” Mel said. The primary influence was Earl Hines, the dominant force in jazz piano and the influence in turn on Tatum and Wilson.

“What in your view was the value of Hines?” I asked. “He was obviously your major hero.”

“Yeah,” Mel said, nodding. “Well, he was damn good! Well. Let’s start with what everyone knows. It’s a little bit fictitious, a myth by now: the business of the octaves sounding like trumpet, which is a far cry from ragtime and stride. That would come to some degree because of his association with Louis Armstrong, I would think. He also played trumpet when he was a kid.

“That seemed to me, very important. Why, specifically, I thought so much of him is that he was just this side of irresponsible. Of all the pianists, none lived so close to the edge of terrible risk. When he went for what we all go for – octaves, runs, whatever – it was always just a little more dangerous, from perhaps even the technical point of view, than it needed to be. Many of us found a haven in doing things that were very effective, but we knew we’d come out winners.”

A short, one-beat chuckle: “Ha! I would never want to bet the ranch with Earl! And yet he would always be phenomenal. It was a temperament, that very disquieted and disquieting temperament, that I found absolutely irresistible: compared, for example, to others I admired very much.

“Fats Waller. Fats had an enormous sense of humor, had a gorgeous bounce in the stride that he would play. If you didn’t smile at that, then you ought not to listen to music altogether. Or Teddy Wilson, with that gorgeous civility. Teddy coming from Earl, I think. But none of them, except Tatum … I think Tatum had the kind of temperament that Earl had. I think that’s true. Although it’s a totally different creature. That kind of temperament was not around, except with Earl Hines and Art Tatum.

“And once a young pianist like myself confronted that, it was quite clear what the Olympian heights were, and what a steep incline to get near there. The more specific answer has to do with choice of notes, things of that sort, and sounds to me more trivial than what I was trying to say. Earl added to the risk of improvisation this technical peril that would make you want to duck. He’d wade right into it. And so, again, with Tatum as well, there was this ability to – how should I say it? – embrace ecstasy. Earl Hines could do that. Transporting the listener… and probably himself as well. I don’t think I ever heard him do anything safe.”

Mel played a few years at Nick’s. One can imagine that he startled the customers, the lanky kid with his glasses and fair hair and serious respectable mien. Writer George Simon eventually arranged for him to audition for Goodman, who hired him for the enormous (for the time) salary of 500 dollars a week, and Mel found himself in the fast company of Sid Catlett, Cootie Williams, and Goodman.

His compositions for the band included “The Earl,” written in tribute to Hines, “Mission to Moscow,” and “Clarinade.” In “The Earl,” his own solo work revealed how much of Hines he had absorbed, including the fluent running octaves and a startling dexterity. These works were the foreshadow of his later career.

I said, “When I was a kid, classical music and jazz were looked on as two separate musics, and when some of the guys went to conservatories, why, jazz was being corrupted. But I have become more and more aware that a lot of the early people, such as James P. Johnson and Willie the Lion Smith, had good training. You can hear the roots of stride in Chopin and that set of variations Schumann wrote on his wife’s maiden name. The left-hand pattern. Even the trumpet players had good brass training. The myth of separate, competitive musics doesn’t make sense.”

“Of course,” Mel said. “I never took the separatism seriously. I thought it was merely a way of making bad use of bad categories. I remember there was a guitarist, I wish I could remember his name, a jazz player, he was the first one I ever heard play excerpts of Wozzeck.”

“On guitar?”

“Yes! I was stunned. This was in the ’30s.”

“That he even knew Wozzeck…”

“There wasn’t a player in the New York Philharmonic who knew it, I can guarantee you. The fact is that not only the eighteenth and nineteenth century had been exploited and explored by a lot of early jazz players – I’m talking about Fats Waller and so on, not today’s kids who are in the atmosphere of college. You’re exactly right. Jazz and classical music were looked on as very different because of the sociological, not the musical, environment.

“When I think of Bix and “In a Mist” and so on, I want to say that the jazz player could be counted on to respond more intelligently to the more interesting advanced, serious music, than any of the so-called classical players. I loathe the term ‘classical’, it’s a misnomer, but you know what I mean.”

“Yes, but we’re stuck with it, as we’re stuck with the term ‘jazz.'”

“Yes. But the jazz player, unquestionably, even if he only said, ‘My God, dig those changes!’, was responding in a far more profound sense to everything advanced than the classical players.”

“Did Earl know the legit repertoire?”

Emphatically: “Yes!” Then: “It was a narrow range, by which I mean he knew some Beethoven, some Brahms. He certainly knew some Scarlatti and some Bach. Then at that point in his life he got busy with Detroit, Chicago. I heard him play some Chopin. You don’t have the technique that Earl had out of the gutter, don’t kid yourself. He was a startling player.”

I said, “Don Redman was a schooled musician, Lunceford was a schooled musician. Bix was listening to Stravinsky.”

“No question,” Mel said. “You can note it from his piano pieces.”

“Now, all of those guys were becoming aware of the movements in modern music in the 1920s. William Grant Still was studying with Varese by 1927. The harmony in dance bands became more adventurous through the 1930s until you got Boyd Raeburn in the ’40s, and Bob Graettinger’s ‘City of Glass’ for Kenton, which sounded radical to me at the time but no longer does. I can’t believe that the arrangers were not aware of all that was going on with the extension of harmony in European music. Bill Challis was starting to use some of that stuff when he was writing for Goldkette. Is there an answer to this question: were the writers waiting for the public to catch up?”

“I think I’ll surprise you,” Mel said. “They were waiting for the bandleaders to catch up. The bandleaders were much more aware of what a negotiable commodity was.” He chuckled. “When an arrangement would be brought in and rejected because ‘That’s too fancy,’ that was a signal that I was no longer welcome. So I meant exactly what I said. If the arrangers were waiting for anything, they were waiting for the bandleaders.”

“Okay. Given Benny Goodman’s inherent conservatism, I am surprised that he welcomed what you wrote. Because some of it was very radical. ‘Mission to Moscow’ is radical for the period.”

“Yeah. It gets close to peril,” he said. “Now, why would Benny respond very favorably to that? And also, by the way, to Eddie Sauter. I don’t think we did this out of slyness. The clarinet music was very interesting. And it was great fun for Benny to play. Yes. ‘Mission to Moscow,’ he had this duet with the piano. So he would put up with these quasi-innovations. I thought that Eddie Sauter brought in some of the most inventive, imaginative things. Eddie was really devoted less to composition than he was to arranging, in the best, deepest sense of ‘ranging’. He was really given over to that. I can recall rehearsals when Eddie Sauter would bring music to us, and it would be rejected. A lot was lost. On some pieces that we do know – for example his arrangement for ‘You Stepped Out of a Dream,’ which I always regarded as a really advanced, marvelous kind of thing – Benny would thin it out. And sometimes get the credit for it being a hit, getting it past the a&r men. I don’t think the thinning out was an improvement. Quite the contrary. I think that Eddie, and I to a lesser degree, were exploring harmonic worlds that ought to have been encouraged, rather than set aside.”

Powell loved the job, the travel, the glamour of the moment when the band rose out of the pit at the Paramount, the attention. Goodman’s notorious quirks, peculiar moods, absent-mindedness, and even downright rudeness never fazed him.

“Benny and I got along very well,” Mel said. “We remained friends to the end of his life. He always used to make me laugh a lot. I had my own bargain-basement psychology involved. Benny seemed to think that I had a lot of money. I don’t know why.” He laughed. “It must have been the way I behaved. And therefore he thought I didn’t need the job. But he always made me laugh.

“He expected us to fight over who was picking up the tab. And he was making all that money. And then marrying a Vanderbilt!”

Mel met Peggy Lee when she joined the band in Chicago, “this gorgeous blonde Scandinavian from the deep midwest,” Mel remembered. Benny was as cool to her as he was to most new members of the band. Peggy had to sing everything in keys set for Helen Forrest, who had just left the band. She has said that Benny gave her no rehearsal, and that her saviour was Mel Powell, who patiently rehearsed her in whatever little time they had.

“Sid Catlett was in the band when you were,” I said.

“I used to really love Sidney Catlett,” Mel said. “Whitney Balliett, who I think was a drummer when he was younger, absolutely adored Sid. So did Buddy Rich. So did Louis Bellson. So did Gene Krupa. And there was good reason.

“Teddy Wilson had a marvelous band at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society Uptown in which Big Sid was the drummer. Often I’d go in. Teddy and I were very good friends. Teddy would ask me to play. And I loved to play.

I thought I was imitating him all the time. And playing with Big Sid! It was enchantment to play with that drummer. The taste, the touch. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if he’d had the kind of equipment that later drummers had. He had a bass drum, a snare drum, a couple of cymbals, and that’s it.

“Sid had an ear for pitch, indefinite or indeterminate pitch. You’d marvel at the way he’d pick spots on the snare drum. And then when he went on the cymbal and started pushing the band! In fact, he was the only one who ever got me to take my hands off the piano. I was taken by the force. I’m sitting here, he’s sitting up there. I’m doing whatever I’m supposed to be doing. This was in Chicago in the Sherman Hotel. Sidney was sitting up, third level, with the trumpets. Band’s playing, wow! ‘One O’Clock Jump.’ Marvelous! And I’m looking at him. A kind of wink, a smile. It was there, it was actually happening. And he was gritting his teeth, he had the greatest control of that kind of tempo. It seemed as if it was loud, but it wasn’t. You know what I mean?”

“Sure. When drummers get forceful, they tend to get loud. The drummer who can play forcefully without getting loud is one of God’s gifts to music.”

“Buddy Rich,” Mel said. “That’s one of the things Louis Bellson certainly learned from Big Sid. Big Sid was doing this, and I was so stunned that believe it or not, unbeknownst to me, my hands just fell. I was just in the audience. And then the piano solo came. It took me a couple of beats. Happily, thank heaven, it wasn’t the Emperor Concerto or something. I was so taken by that guy’s playing.”

“Supposedly Benny fired Catlett during a record date. Why?”

“I’ve never known really what was what,” Mel said. “We made The Earl’ on that session.”

“Is that why there are no drums on it?”

“Exactly. I am almost certain it was in Liederkrantz Hall in New York. Right then and there, as we were recording. I have been asked a hundred times what happened between Sid and Benny. I will never know.”

As much as he liked working with Goodman and the superb musicians Goodman hired, including Charlie Christian, Mel would within a year begin to tire of the band.

He said, “When I to some degree lost interest and went on to do some other things instead, it was largely because formulas were replacing improvisation in a certain sense. It was still improvised: but very predictable. I don’t really want to make anyone sound like a culprit. But the demands of the profession -I think it was a wonderful band – nevertheless, every night the same pieces …

“I preferred the small band. I think Benny played better when I was

the leader than when he was. He was able to loosen up and forget about it.”

“I think the best I ever heard him play,” I said, “was on your Commodore record of The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.‘”

“I’m not kidding,” Mel said. “I do think it was his best.”

“Cannonball Adderley came to hate his own hits because he had to play them every night.”

“Sure. It’s very difficult to stay at the perilous stage. It’s very difficult to do that when you know everything that’s coming. The whole point is not to know almost anything that’s coming.

“I think jazz is the ideal performer’s music. Spontaneity is it. Make it up as you go. I think it has to be that. I think Benny tried hard. There’s a great difference between pianists. Certain of them, you hear them, and it sounds like they improvised that. The catch, however, is that every time you hear them, they play exactly that. That’s a different business than we’re talking about.”

I said, “There are some records of Teddy Wilson, different takes of the same tune, where what he plays is pretty set. There’s some variation, but a lot of it is set. Certain patterns at certain places.”

“Pretty set, yes,” Mel said. “No one admired him more than I did. Nevertheless, I’ll be audacious enough to say that despite the fact that I took much from him – as I did from others, from Earl, from Fats too, I think, from Tatum – the fact is that at any cost, I was improvising. I would be willing to be bad, but I was going to improvise. Teddy would not do that. He always sounded marvelous, of course. But that didn’t seem to me to be what was necessary.

“Even Louis of all people played as though it were a set piece. But Earl didn’t. Again, the peril, the risk. You had no idea what was going to happen when Hines started to play. And I don’t think he did.”

After leaving Goodman, Mel did some freelance studio work in New York but then got his draft notice and was shipped to Fort Dix. “I encountered a southern sergeant who had a genuine hatred of Jews, and when he saw the name on my papers, he assigned me immediately to latrine duty. I changed it legally. An uncle had done it before me, taking the name Powell from Poljanowsky.”

He would not have stayed on latrine duty in any event: hardly was he accustomed to the feel of his uniform than Glenn Miller commandeered him to play in the latter’s Army Air Force band. His bandmates included Ray McKinley, Carmen Mastren, Zeke Zarchy, and Peanuts Hucko. The band had a string section, and Powell was able to write string trios for some of its players. And it began rehearsing at Yale University. Mel had no way of knowing that Yale would become his home in a few years.

Almost everyone in the band was under 30. Miller was 38. Probably the youngest member was a trombonist from Brooklyn named Nat Peck who, at 18, was not long out of high school. A Swing Sextet was organized within the Miller band, with Mel as its director. Long afterwards, Peck said that “Mel took a liking to me for some odd reason and I was chosen to do it… The reason I was picked, I think, was that I was the only one in that trombone section who had any sort of experience in playing jazz … Mind you, at the time I was very nervous about it – I didn’t know Mel that well. Mel was a very distant sort of a personality – not that he was unkind, or anything like that, but he was already very big-time… and I used to sit in (the) band a little worried about things and he misinterpreted my attitude. He thought that I was putting him down, or being critical about what was going on in the band, when, to tell you the truth, I was more scared than anything else. He discovered that, though, soon enough and we ended up really very, very good friends.”

Peck made these comments to a British writer, Geoffrey Butcher. They are quoted in Butcher’s book Next to a Letter from Home (Sphere Books, London, England, 1987), a chronicle of the sojourn in England and France of the wartime Miller band. That Miller thought as highly of Powell as Goodman before him is evident in Peck’s comment: “Mel had a completely free hand. The only time Miller ever turned up was on the first rehearsal… Probably it wasn’t from lack of interest, but he listened to the broadcasts and he found them eminently satisfactory and decided not to intervene in any way and Mel was free to do as he wanted.”

Paris was liberated on 24 August 1944. Mel, by then a sergeant, allowed considerable liberty by Miller, managed to slip over from England two or three days later, when the city’s mad partying was still in progress.

“I went to the Bibliotheque Nationale,” Mel said. “At the time my French was reasonably fluent, which was gratefully acknowledged by the music librarian. As a matter of fact, everybody was out drinking and running around, and here I came in with the eyeglasses and speaking French. The place was absolutely empty. And I asked if I could see some of the early work of Debussy.

“He said, ‘Sure.’ This was before Xerox, of course. This was the original stuff. 

Perhaps they had microfiche by then, I’m not sure. There were some photographs, certainly. I have The Golliwog’s Cakewalk in the autograph. I was shown work he did at the age of 11 or 12, work that nobody knows. This was the grandest discovery I made. The most remarkable thing was that there was the stuff, the parallel fifths marked as mistakes by the teacher. The harmony was poor. But the counterpoint was incredibly good. Twelve to sixteen part stuff! This kid at 12 or whatever he was at the Conservatoire.” (Debussy entered the Conservatoire at 10.)

“It was exactly the opposite of what you would think,” Mel said. “You’d think the harmony would be excellent, the counterpoint perfunctory. Un-unh: the exact opposite.”

Miller prepared to move the band to France by Christmas. On 15 December he took off in an 8th Air Force Norseman aircraft piloted by Flight Officer John R. S. Morgan. Their flight was lost over the Channel. Ray McKinley, the one member of the band who was an experienced bandleader, took over the direction of the Miller crew. On Christmas Eve they made a broadcast from the Olympia theater in Paris, on the same program with Robert Farnon and George Melachrino.

With the fall of Germany in May of 1945, the Miller band was shipped home to the United States. It was being readied to go to the South Pacific under Ray McKinley’s direction when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and suddenly it was over.

Mustered out of service, Mel returned for a time to Goodman. He was offered a job on the composition staff of MGM, probably on the recommendation of his friends Lennie Hayton and Andre Previn, who were already there. He took the job and hated it, but it was during this period that he met Martha Scott, who unsentimentally describes herself as “an old actress from Kansas.” But, she quickly points out, she grew up in Kansas City when the Basie band was forming there and, later, when Charlie Parker was flexing his wings. She was a jazz-lover, and the affinity of Mel and Martha was immediate. She and Mel were married in 1946, eventually had two daughters, and remained devoted to each other.

As his duties at MGM palled on him, Mel applied for admission to Yale, submitting a composition to Paul Hindemith, head of the composition department.

By the end of the 1920s, Hindemith, then 25, was esteemed as the outstanding German composer of his generation. Like Mel Powell, he was considered something of a prodigy: conductor of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra by the age of 20, and then an outstanding viola player. He was an outspoken opponent of the serialism pioneered and expounded by Arnold Schoenberg, and argued that all music was inherently tonal. (Schoenberg himself objected to the term “atonal.”)

In 1934 Hindemith was publicly denounced by Josef Goebbels as “a spiritual non-Aryan” and a “cultural Bolshevist” and although he was not, as Arnold Schoenberg was, Jewish, he joined a large migration of German artists, Schoenberg and Thomas Mann among them, and more from other countries, including Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Bartok, to the safety of the United States.

Hindemith was an outstanding educator. He had taught in Berlin and Ankara, and continued his work at Yale University. His prestige at the time Powell applied to study with him was enormous.

“Now,” I said to Mel, “the last jazz records of yours I had were in the earlydays of the LP, the ten-inch LP. You did some sessions for John Hammond on Vanguard, things like ‘Russian Lullaby’ with Ruby Braff and Edmond Hall and a wonderful rhythm guitar player named Steve Jordan.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you keep going back to jazz and working with Goodman if that was not going to be your direction? For money?”

“Yes. Money.”

“And how were you funding your studies?”

“The GI bill. And don’t forget, by then I was married. I had a wife who was a working actress. We could not have lived as well as we did had it not been for Martha’s income.” A chuckle. “I hope I’ve made it up to her.”

“You wrote a Sonatina that you recorded in one of those albums. And I realized a change was in the works.”

“That was serious.”

“Then I heard a piece you wrote for the Louisville Orchestra.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. For three years I covered that program. Elliott Carter, Ginastera, Orrega Sallas, all of those new works. I reviewed all that stuff. But that’s when I heard one of your orchestral pieces. And then you just ceased to play jazz?”

“Yes. Except when we got a little bagged, Hindemith and I. He was to deliver the Norton Lectures at Harvard, A Composer’s World. I had written a paper on Alban Berg. Apparently I was the most literate of the group that interested him. So he invited me to his house to touch up his lectures.

“Which I did. You know, Andre Previn is a phenomenon for his command of English, when you consider he didn’t speak it until he was 14. Andre used to howl when I told him about this: how I would say to Hindemith, ‘No, we don’t say, “now to my house going.” We don’t do that in English. I would change it and he would always fight. He would say, ‘My words! You’re changing my meaning!’ I’d say, ‘Maestro, no. Take my word for it.’ And we’d get loaded. Liebfraumilch was his big drink.

“Sure enough, he had two pianos upstairs. He’d get a little bit bagged and we’d go up, and we would do two things. We would play Verdi opera. Or we would play his jazz of the 1920s. He had played it in bad bands in Germany. Very few people know that. I was amazed. He would sit there and play the most atrocious stuff.”

Hindemith was unimpressed by Mel’s facility and subjected him to severe compositional disciplines. Mel says that Hindemith had the greatest pedagogical mind he ever encountered.

“He would look at something of mine and say, ‘Po-vell.’ Being German he couldn’t pronounce Powell. He’d say, ‘Po-vell, why have you written this?’ I would say, ‘I feel that – ‘And he would say, ‘I don’t care how you feel. That is for your doctor. Why did you write it?'”

Mel survived, earning his master’s degree and becoming Hindemith’s teaching assistant. People in the jazz world would hear of him occasionally, but he seemed like a fading wraith. When Hindemith left Yale to return to Europe (where he died in 1963), Mel succeeded him, becoming a full professor and head of the composition department.

I said, “When you withdrew from jazz, the air in the press was like you had deserted this music for classical music. There was that view of jazz as gutter music and your move being an aspiration to respectability.”

“Yes. To this day, I will come upon old friends from the jazz world, who will, in fun and good spirits, call me a traitor. It always seemed absurd to me, since what passes for my own philosophical outlook is that we ought to do everything – when we can.

“Oddly enough, I am still known, I think – well, this generation doesn’t know anything – as a decent jazz pianist, despite the fact that I spent comparatively little time in jazz, which must mean I came to the attention of people when jazz was the most attractive, the most illustrious, the most public and the most famous kind of popular music. It was just extraordinary. I’ve often thought it was much like late nineteenth-century Italy, where the best music of the time was by coincidence also the most popular.”

I said, “It was a very short period. If you date the era from Whiteman and Ellington and Goldkette, it lasted about twenty years, but its big period was from the time Benny broke through until 1946, when so many bands folded, which makes it about ten years. Rock-and-roll has been with us for nearly 40.”

“Isn’t that amazing?” Mel said. “I assume I’ve missed something very important in not knowing about rock-and-roll.”

“I assume I haven’t. Someone is always telling me there are nuggets there if only you have the patience to search. I say that Bach is nothing but nuggets. The lode is infinitely richer, and how much time does each of us have to explore it?”

“Yes,” Mel said, laughing hard, “but I deal with young kids every day.”

“That music has no harmonic interest to me.”

“None whatsoever.”

“I find it rhythmically stiff.”

“Rhythmically, it’s terrible,” he said, “and melodically, it’s absurd. And the lyrics, whenever I can understand the declamation, which isn’t frequently … Well, I do understand the word ‘baby.'”

“The other one is ‘girl,'” I said. “As in, ‘Hey, girl.’ They throw ‘girl’ in a lot.”

“Much beyond that, I don’t hear. Perhaps the lyrics are interesting, though I think not.

“You know, I think the inability to admire contributed greatly to the growth of rock-and-roll. When you and I first heard music, we began right off the bat saying, ‘That’s marvelous! I can’t do that!’ I don’t care whether it was Jascha Heifetz or Fats Waller. When I first heard Tatum, my inclination was to say, ‘I can’t do that!’ But the kids hearing rock-and-roll say, ‘I can do that.’ And I think that that kind of narcissism came into the world …”

“Adlai Stevenson came up with the phrase. He said, ‘We have lost our regard for excellence.’ It was in everything, every field.”

“In everything. It also got confused with what was politically perhaps very attractive, and that was the disrespect for authority. That’s fine. But I think it got mixed up with that.”

I said, “Well, there was a PR campaign by the entertainment industry to the effect that any respect for excellence was elitism, and that this was somehow anti-democratic. That’s more of the nonsense that helped wreck this culture, which is in pretty bad shape.”

“Bad shape,” Mel concurred with a sigh. “You’re talking to someone who tomorrow morning meets with young people in their 20s. And I have to bear in mind that it’s something like 33 years since Humphrey Bogart died. So I have to be careful. Some of my references are useless. I’m talking about so-called classical music.”

“You mean, young classical musicians, who don’t know the tradition?”

“Don’t know it. My contribution has been to argue that, ironically, composers like Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, and myself, are in fact Eurocentric. It’s ironic since, certainly in my own case, and in Milton’s, jazz played a big part in our development.”

“Yeah, Milton Babbitt played jazz clarinet, I believe.”

“Yes. There’s no reason to know that. What I was going to say is that our form of composition tends to be Eurocentric. It derives from Stravinsky and Schoenberg, two different worlds merging, more or less. Schoenberg has won out for the waning years of our century.

“But the kids coming up today are not Eurocentric. One day I was talking about Mahler, and I made a reference to The Magic Mountain. I got those glazed eyes. And then I realized they were thinking of the playland Magic Mountain, and they wanted to know what Mahler had to do with a roller coaster. We no longer have a common referential framework.

“I was talking to Susan Sontag. She was bitching that she had done two weeks’ teaching in Salt Lake City or someplace. I said, Two weeks? I’ve been teaching for 40 years. What chutzpah to say that.’ I told her about the Magic Mountain business. She said, ‘You were looking for kids to know Thomas Mann?’ I said, ‘Yes, I was.’ She said, ‘I just spent two weeks in Utah looking for anyone who had heard of Mussolini!’

“That broke me up.”

“The question of accessibility in music has troubled me for years,” I said. “Schoenberg is still considered avant garde art. And it’s getting on toward being a century later. So are Joyce and Picasso. You were talking about the period when the best music of Europe was also the most popular. What is the responsibility of the composer to the public? You strike me as a fascinating dichotomy, because of your ability to make tremendously accessible music such as ‘Mission to Moscow,’ and then to go in this other direction.”

“The answer is direct,” Mel said. “I don’t feel any particular responsibility toward anyone other than the severest critic, whom I identify as myself. It’s not elitism I’m talking about.”

“Well, I’m an elitist in the sense that I certainly prefer Jerome Kern to Lennon and McCartney.”

“There you go,” Mel said. “Exactly. So do I, by the way. Not only that. I happen to think of Rodgers and Hart as men of genius. Really. I’m absolutely bowled over by them. But from my work, you’d say, ‘Did Powell really say that?'”

I said, “Well the question that has been hanging over us for a long time is: is the tonal system obsolete?”

“Oh, I see. Well. Actually, we’re making a bad mistake in talking in terms of tonal or non-tonal -I call it non-tonal – music. Out of deference to Schoenberg, I call it non-tonal. It’s a mistake on Schoenberg’s part, on all our parts, to talk in terms of pitch, which is what the tonal or non-tonal system focuses on. The truth is that the fundamental element, fundamental dimension, of the art is time, and the way time is used is far more strategic, more mystifying, and more important than the way pitch is used.

“It’s easy enough to say that Schoenberg is obsolete, Berg is obsolete. Eurocentric is obsolete, if you hear John Adams. You’d think there had been a most remarkable regression, with the Beatles coming after Duke Ellington. Chronologically, there is something wrong in terms of sophistication, complexity, and so on. And here is John Adams, a young guy of 38 or 39 or so, writing operas and so on. It’s simply music on a loop. It goes around and around and around. Like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Just over and over again. What we would in jazz call two-, three-, four-bar riffs. They just keep going for twenty minutes, and then another riff.

“Non-tonality is extraordinary in what is implicit in it. But what is far more significant and extraordinary is the nature of the usage of time. That’s where revolutions are made, you see. For that reason I think that Claude Debussy is perhaps the most revolutionary of all twentieth-century composers. He changed our view of time. There’s been a mistake all these years to be looking at his thirteenth chords and whole-tone scales. Forget that. The extraordinary thing that Debussy did, and only l’esprit Gallique could do it, was to flatten out the difference between an up beat and a down beat.

“Here would be dominantic harmony, and here would be dominantic harmony. Unthinkable from the German point of view. So he began to equalize, and in doing that he touched on what I think is one of the essentials in the new music and the more interesting music.”

“That’s a startling thought,” I said. “I have always viewed him for the harmonic factor.”

“Let us grant that. But all that stuff was there in Cesar Franck. All that stuff was there in Wagner, all that stuff was there in Richard Strauss. Really.

“I think our teaching and learning have become so subordinate to the needs of institutions – I’m sounding awful, saying this – that we tend to emphasize the more teachable. Pitch happens to be very teachable.

“I could, in three days, show you the entirety of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. I could show you how the pitch operates. And it’s original and interesting. But I could show you the systematics.

“But I’d have a hell of a time telling you what Webern was up to with respect to time. And how he prevented you from sensing it. So when you looked at the score, you would say, ‘My God, was that four-four? Where was the down beat? Was there a structural down beat?’ Etcetera.

“That’s where the mysteries reside. And Debussy was the first. Where I bet the ranch is L’apres-midi d’unfaune. I always tell the students, ‘Please, when the flute begins that piece, don’t look at the conductor. Because Debussy has done everything possible to keep you from knowing what the hell is going on with…'” And he sang the opening flute line of the piece. “Weird. Where is one? He’s done everything possible to conceal it. Don’t watch the fool doing this …” And he waved his hand slowly, like a conductor. “Which gives you beats that aren’t there. They aren’t sonic, they aren’t acoustic.

“No, I can’t rave enough about the incredible invention by Debussy of a new usage of time, and I think that our century at its best is about that. It’s one of the reasons why I think jazz is so important, and why I think rock-and-roll is not. Rock-and-roll is not only not a new use of time – for the most part – it is a very dull, old use. It would be like somebody writing in the so-called classical world like Clementi.

“So. Yes. The use of time. I speak, possibly for only aesthetic purposes, of temporal structure – I am tired of the word ‘rhythm.’ Most of the analysis that I teach now – driving the kids nuts – is indeed to show how uninteresting (this is a terrible thing to say!) most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European music is. Terrible. I should bite my tongue.

“I’m speaking only of the rhythmic dimension, of course. Not textural. Bach, I think, is the greatest composer who ever lived. Or the incredible brain work of Brahms that’s not widely known. He was very much a twentieth-century kind of thinker. The music, disguised as pretty lyricism, has a lot of terribly serious, inventive kinds of things. There is an irony in that we thought Wagner was the zukunstwerke, the music of the future, artwork of the future, and Brahms was the old shoe of the Romantic era.

“It’s turned out quite differently. Brahms’ way of putting music together turns out to be much closer to what interests post-Schoenbergians. Even though Boulez doesn’t play him.

“After studying with Hindemith, I wrote quite like him, and quite like most Hindemith students. And I strongly recommend that people do that. I think it’s foolish to study with, let’s say, Bartok, in order to write like Schoenberg or Berg. If you are fortunate enough, as I was, to study with a world master such as Hindemith, the very best thing to do is write quite like him.”

“That makes complete sense to me,” I said. “In the Renaissance, students were made to copy the works of the masters. If you want to find out about his brush strokes, his texture, if you want to get the feel of the paint on the brush and give of the canvas, copy him until you get it right.”

“Well,” Mel said, “that’s almost essentially what I did with Hindemith. Including the Louisville piece you heard. It’s an analogue of a piece of Hindemith’s. How else can you really come to terms with a master? You go deeply, deeply into what he knows.”

“That’s why I get annoyed when I hear critics saying some young jazz player is ‘derivative’ of somebody.”

“My goodness, yes. Now, when you do that, copy a master, there comes a moment that is miraculous. Not necessarily happy. There comes the moment when you now have full grasp of the technique and craft of a great master in his terms, and you are aware of the fact that it ain’t… your … cup of tea. It is not with lack of respect or even reverence for it. Et apres, as the French say. You’re going to write another Hindemith piece? We don’t need another Hindemith piece.

“You know, Hindemith taught negatively. He rarely gave a compliment. Eventually I gave him a piece, and he said, ‘That’s pretty good, Po-vell. I could have written it.’ And he laughed and said, ‘I think I did.’

“Now that takes a couple of years to get that command of another man’s usage. When it happens – it was for me, in any case; and others I’ve talked to: Pierre Boulez, they’ve all experienced it – it was one of the most strategic crises I’ve gone through. It came to me that now I could do anything, I had the technique to do anything compositionally, I could now sit down and plot out my life. I’ll write ten symphonies, in order to get one past Beethoven. I’ll do three operas, I’ll do fourteen piano concertos, etcetera etcetera. But it would have to be in that language, because that’s where the technique is.

“That was a terrible moment. I dropped the pen, at least metaphorically. I said, ‘We have Hindemith. And we don’t really require me to do anything, unless perhaps I should just teach, since I understand it so deeply.

“I realized it could not work for me, because the rhythm was square, and that I had been forcing myself in the early Hindemith pieces into, uh, corny rhythmic sequences in order to let the system work. It demanded that.

“A real style finds every one of its dimensions analogous. If Mozart ends a phrase melodically, he does so harmonically as well. He does so in terms of orchestral color – the winds have just come in. Or just gone out. He does so in terms of pitch. Everything ends simultaneously. It may be only measure eight. Wagner does not. It’s Romanticism. The dimensions are arguing with one another.

“When I say that every dimension in a real, real classic style – in the other sense – really works, all you have to do is imagine Debussy orchestrating Bruckner or Mahler. It would be absurd. Or vice versa. All the dimensions have to be aligned. Think of the vagueness in Debussy. There’s no possibility that it would work, if he orchestrated Mahler.

“When it came to me that what I had been doing deliberately with the fundamental element, time, was making it very Germanic, very straightforward, because it was the only way that that language Hindemith had taught, and invented for his artistic purposes, would work, that was a dismal day. I had to go crawling around elsewhere. What I could now do very well was not what I cared to do.

“On the one hand I had learned what I wanted to know about the craft. But no, this somehow would not serve my needs. And of course at the same time I ran into some other composers, Webern etcetera. Most important was that in order for Hindemith’s language or any so-called neo-classic writing to work, it was necessary to have a pulse, or striated time.” He tapped a steady beat on his desk. “The harmony would not work without it, the melodies would make no sense, indeed even the coloring – although that begins to get complicated – would make no sense.

“I once, in a class, speaking of timbre or color, showed – maybe being a little too smart; I was a young professor then – that Mozart with the simplest of orchestras manifested the most impeccable correlation of structure and color. For example, a move from X to Y, usually from tonic to dominant, would be marked. For it was there, when the dominant was reached, that the woodwinds came in. He’s only got woodwinds and strings in his orchestra; the horns and the trumpets play long notes. In short, all the dimensions have to stack up and agree, to make any sense. So, facing all these things really caused me a good deal of discontent. That was a rather dark night.

“It’s easier for me now to look at that comparatively young fellow who was meandering about. I was heading for or had arrived at 30. So here I was, equipped as I had wished to be, and yet couldn’t use the stuff. The only analogue I can think of is that it was as if somebody had bought you a baseball bat, a catcher’s mitt, and a mask, and now you wanted to play football.

“I had to start all over again, within the domain of so-called serious music.

And I began, to speak in the simplest terms, to veer from neo-classicism, which entails many things, not just tonality, which is the most notable perhaps or at least the most discussed. What should be equivalently obvious is the formal structures of classicism, sonata allegros, scherzos and trios.”

“Debussy had little attraction to those forms.”

“Well,” Mel said, “Debussy is so sly. What he does is so underground.”

“Now,” he said, “I am going to give you one thought that is going to be repugnant to you as a lyricist. I now tell my students that if they are interested in writing art songs, that the ideal thing for them to do – and I give them some formulas and things – is write melismatically. Why? The very thing you as a lyricist dislike.”

“Not if it’s total,” I said. “If you’re going to use the voice as a wordless instrument, that’s another thing. But if you’re going to use words …”

“Ah but there’s a deeper reason,” Mel said. “They always get the point, and it saves five lectures. I tell them, if you try to compete with the great American pop songs, you’re going to be knocked out in the first innings. Because of the match of tone and words. I tell them, don’t compete. Go over somewhere else.”

I said, “I am always conscious of intervals in speech and even in birds, all sorts of recognizable intervals. Once, in a Chinese restaurant I heard the owner and his wife arguing in the kitchen. I kept catching inversions of the major triad. And emotion was being conveyed. Entire communications can be made by speech inflections and pitch alone.”

“That goes into training for actors, by the way,” Mel said.

“Pitch to me has distinct communication value.”

“No question,” Mel said, and sang, “Johnny,” a falling minor third, as if calling a child. Specifically, he hit A-flat and F.

“The first inversion of the major triad has a very playful sound,” I said.

“Sure.”

“Kern is an utterly distinctive melodist working within a system that is now centuries old.”

“Yes.”

“And you say ‘Don’t compete with the likes of Kern.'”

“Or Oscar Hammerstein or Lorenz Hart,” Mel said. “My God. I actually pushed and taught the melisma because they ain’t never gonna do ‘Night and day, you are the one …’ So in a certain sense, I’ve given them the easy way out. Now, on the other hand, abstractly, the melisma can be expressive of whatever you want to be expressive of. However, non-tonality restricts the expressive domain, the terrain. There are restraints. I could make you giggle by saying, ‘Imagine Schoenberg writing a comic opera.’

“It ain’t there. Forget it. The only thing that will make you laugh is the idea of such a thing happening. It’s not going to happen with Webern, it’s not going to happen with Alban Berg. Non-tonality, or atonality as some like to call it, is restricted in its expressive power. Well, that’s the price you pay. Most languages are restrictive in their expressive power.”

“Sure. You can say and think things in French you can’t say in English, and vice versa. The French have no word for upstairs. Or home.”

“Exactly. You don’t say, ‘Thou shithead/ I mean, please. One or the other. I can handle either language. Similarly in music. I point out that, after all, opera was alive and well in Bach’s time. Bach didn’t touch it. Bach wrote philosophic disquisitions. The fugue is not a form, the fugue is a process, a thinking process. 

Whereas Verdi, more than a century later, would simply write a so-called Italian sixth chord with two clarinets and two bassoons in Rigoletto and scare the hell out of you. You look at the page and say, ‘What is that? It’s just a chord there.’ Yeah, well, it’s the right chord at the right moment for Italian opera. Bach didn’t touch it. His language also had constraints.

“So. I make that quite clear. I say, ‘Don’t try for “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.” You ain’t gonna get it, unless you’ve got Oscar Hammerstein as your collaborator.'”

“But we’re getting,” I said, “at what is dichotomous with you. I have been on a collision course with this thought for years: what is music for? Why do we do it? What is its specific function? I’ve always said it’s a mysterious language. We don’t know why and how music affects the emotions.”

Mel said, “One of my pet theories is that at some point, someone yelled, ‘Help!’ And that would have meant hysteria. And he or she in a moment of serenity when he or she had escaped recalled that peculiar effect of the heightened inflection, and did it again, only this time without the panic.”

I said, “This is the theory of music as abstracted speech. But I have become convinced that speech is abstracted music. To me, the idea of music as symbolic speech must be inherently incorrect, because there was music before there was speech, if only in the cries of birds. So I suspect that speech arises out of music. We’re never going to know.”

“Oh, I’m sure we will,” Mel said. “Some day we’ll do it with confidence. The only way we can handle this is when we close in on, first, what we mean by emotion, and second, what is the bridge that creates the linkage between emotion and the expression thereof. Words are there, of course. But music is there, so much more powerfully in so many ways. We organize the world into space and time. Fine. It seems to correspond to our senses. But that’s the way we see the world. So do we see the world as: this is intellect, this is intuition, etcetera. Although I can never do that seriously.

“One day I walked down the street in New Haven with a young colleague of mine, who was a professor of biochemistry. At the time I was practicing scientism. That is, my lectures eliminated all adjectives, etcetera etcetera. This guy, on the other hand, said, ‘Are you familiar with the binomial theorem?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

“I was stunned to hear the word ‘beautiful.’ And he meant beautiful in the sense we mean beautiful. And I thought, This guy is over there in the biochemistry, hence science department. I am talking about registral invariance, [how composers might keep specific sonic “fingerprints” consistent throughout a piece, using register as a flexible element rather than a fixed one] which is a very complex way of saying a certain tessitura [the “sweet spot” where a voice sounds best and can sustain notes easily], is predominant. I’m talking like a brain surgeon or something, and this guy is talking like a jazz fan.’ It was like, ‘Dig these changes!’ or something. He meant beautiful. So therefore let us assume that it’s only convenient for us to say, Thus and so is intellectual, thus and so is intuition.’ Now you’ve got that wonderful Stravinsky expression: ‘Intuition never misleads you. When it does, it’s not intuition.’ That’s nice, that’s cute.

“But that’s the best we can do in organizing things. You read Einstein, as far as you can, which is not terribly far in my case. I can read ideas and opinions, I can read those books that he wrote. And if that isn’t ‘warm’ and if that isn’t almost vibrato on the cello!

“So I am willing to accept the modes of organization with a reservation underneath. When you come to the question of what is music for, we’re touching on that kind of fundamental thing. You know, Verdi fell to the floor the first time he heard a big C-major chord in church, in the little Italian village where his mother took him to church. He fell into a dead faint. You can imagine this resounding, great huge organ playing a big C-major chord with all the stops out, two feet, four feet, sixteen feet, everything. And the kid went plop! Fainted dead away. I don’t think there was any word or any combination of words that could have affected him that way.

“Maybe at that moment – we can only guess – all these things were integrated, what we call the intellect, the intuition, the emotions, all the things we have names for. Maybe music can do that.”

I said, “It’s been a mystery all my life, how music does this, causes tears, causes laughter. I’ve heard jazz solos that made me laugh, laugh out loud at something somebody played, and I can’t even tell you what was funny. It just was.”

“Absolutely,” Mel said. “Wit. Caprice. Bunny Berigan playing I Can’t Get Started if you happen to like that, which I do. Music can do that. Music can integrate. I always must say this apologetically: I know very few writers of words who can even approach this. Music can make you fully aware of the inadequacy of the verbal language.”

“I call music the language beyond language. Music can express, and evoke, the emotions for which there are no words. Bill Evans could play shades of emotion you didn’t know you had. Bill played emotions that were so private that I have never even tried to express them.”

“Sort of as if he looked over to see is anybody watching?” Mel said. “This is my business.”

“Given that this capacity is there,” I said, “what do you expect people -I am asking not the you you, but a whole range of people, including Milton Babbitt.”

“Elliott Carter,” Mel added, knowing where my question was leading.

“What do you expect the audience to bring to this experience?”

“The ability to say ‘Wow!’ That’s all.”

“How do they get to this if the language is strange to them?”

“By giving up the attempt to understand anything, and marveling at imagination. Wow!”

“I got some moments of that out of your Pulitzer concerto, which I haven’t yet listened to enough. I get moments of it out of Penderecki and Ligeti. But not for long. I can’t take an hour of it.”

Mel said, “Well, I have these egomaniacal aspirations. I hope that the 32 minutes or so that the piece takes, the concerto, doesn’t seem long. I’ve heard ten-minute pieces that sounded longer! At least to me.”

“I didn’t realize it was that long,” I said. “I was going to tell you it seems rather short.”

“Good! That’s good. I’m happy about that. I think… This is dangerous to say, because God knows the younger people today don’t need any authorization for stupidity. They seem to have all the stupidity they need. But you can take virtually any piece of music – you might even be able to do this with prose – and show relationships that are so involuted, so strategic, clever, crucial, yet were never known to the composer. You can only do it backwards. Here’s the piece that one writes. And now the analysis.”

“Sure. And if you were consciously aware of all these things while working, you couldn’t do it in the first place. Technique must be unconscious. If you have to think about the clutch and the gearshift and the brake, you aren’t ready to drive the car. Unless the mechanics of the craft have sunk to that level, you’re not even in business.”

“Yes,” Mel said. “That then is what I meant.

“If you approach the task of musical analysis as though you are decoding some cryptic message, you’re wrong to start with. It’s not what it’s about. You will see and hear in the work of a gifted and competent craftsman many things that are craftsmanlike, just as you will with any writer. You will see them playing with words like wizards on the stage. Sometimes I’ll read a sentence or two of Loren Eiseley, say, who was very careful about words. He’s using one- or at maximum two-syllable words. But there probably are certain things that a writer would see, patterns of vowels, rhythm, long sentences, short sentences, the building of paragraphs. All those things should be known after you have learned the craft. But I can show you much more complex, profound relationships after the fact: did the composer know that?” I said, “it’s always coming up: if you work hard enough, God will be nice to you.”

“Yes!” Mel said, chuckling. “If you work hard enough, God will drop something in your pocket. Eventually the geist will be there. That’s one of the reasons why going to your desk, at whatever you do, on a quite steady basis, is crucial. You have to, as the gamblers say, be able to cut your losses. But you have to be there where the action is. And sooner or later, I think God will be nice to you if you work hard enough.”

Mel made the move from Connecticut to California in the mid-1960s, when Aaron Copland recommended him to head the music department at CalArts, an institution set up partly with money from Walt Disney and designed as a place where artists from the various disciplines could meet and talk and affect each other. Kingman Brewster, president of Yale, urged Mel not to make the move to California, saying, “All they have out there is carnivals,” but the idea of an interdisciplinary institution was attractive to Powell, and he took the job. He was provost of CalArts from 1972 to 1976, but he hated the job and resigned to devote himself strictly to teaching, which he loved, for all his wry humor about the limitations and lack of cultural education of young music students.

Mel was a dedicated tennis player until one day he was on his way to a match when his legs gave way and he fell on a sidewalk. He got up, went on to his game, and didn’t think much about it, but it happened again, and he consulted his doctor. Eventually his disorder was diagnosed as inclusionary polymyositis. The disease had affected the quadriceps, making it difficult for him to lift his legs. He is a man remarkably devoid of self-pity, although he admitted to missing tennis. He said, “My reaction wasn’t: why me? It was: why not me? And I felt how lucky I had been not to have had anything wrong with me before.”

Mel wrote in a study off the kitchen of the one-storey house in which he and Martha had lived for many years, down a step that was now covered by a ramp. He would tell you to stand back as he came down the ramp on his electric cart, saying that the gadget, which he maneuvered with great skill, had been known to misbehave. 

“A regular Barney Oldfield,” he said. The studio contained a baby grand piano, some sort of electronic keyboard, a desk, a writing table, and the inevitable messy clutter of books and scores and manuscripts. A few floppy disks on the table reminded you of the electronic music which is one of his interests.

Martha became part of a cabal to get him back to playing some of his beloved jazz. Also involved in the conspiracy were Hank O’Neal and Shelly Shier, who ran the jazz cruises on the SS Norway. Finally they persuaded him to take part in the 1987 cruise. I’d heard that Mel practiced for six months to get ready for that cruise. Was it true?

“Yes! That probably sounds a little more ferocious than it actually was. But there is no question that for at least six months, I’d get up in the morning, and I’d go to the keyboard like a good boy, and I’d do what I had not done in a long, long time, which is essentially practicing.”

“How did it feel, to be back out there sitting in a rhythm section, banging away?”

“I was just grinning for two weeks. At the time, since it was considerably before some of the affliction took hold, I had a drink of Irish whiskey, got up on the bandstand . . . and there were old friends like Joe Williams. It was wonderful! Wonderful to see Joe again, and Dizzy! And Louis Bellson. You don’t know how good these guys are until you’ve been a long time away from them. Then. The way Louis played! I mean, the way he wasn’t there and was there, you know? Oooh! I was stunned. I was just stunned at that kind of support. And Milt Hinton! And Major Holley. A young kid named Howard Alden on guitar, very good. Buddy and I and Dizzy playing some stuff. God, the way these guys play!”

Mel Powell embodied what for me is the aesthetic dichotomy of our time. He not only did not resolve my bemusement over it, he deepened it.

The question of accessibility in art is a vexed one for which there is no simple answer, perhaps no answer at all. Popularity is no proof of excellence. Having reached this obvious conclusion, one must be cautious, for neither is the lack of it. One of the problems of jazz has always been that a certain kind of admirer prefers that it be considered arcane, in order that his or her taste for it can be self-seen as informed, exceptional, and superior. This attitude is pilloried in Dave Frishberg’s lyric “I’m Hip.” It is probably not as common as it once was, but one encounters it.

I have believed since my earliest years that if the artist wishes to communicate, the onus is on him to be clear. But clear to whom? An imbecile? Or to the sophisticated, informed member of the audience, capable of detecting every echo and inversion and retrograde presentation of a piece of thematic material and all its implications of rhythmic and harmonic and orchestrational texture? Should one listen to the “serious” composer for the purpose of solving his puzzles? Mel said not. So much for a possible theory of contemporary composition as an exercise in acrostic decipherment. But what can make us say “Wow” if we do not understand? Someone might write an emotional poem, but if it’s in Urdu, it cannot make us say “Wow.”

I take consolation in something Mel’s friend Andre Previn wrote about him. Andre said that Mel’s music became “more and more complicated and private, and some of his work taxed any musical mind severely, unless it had been schooled by the likes of Elliott Carter.” Andre described it as being “as easily assimilated as the Dead Sea scrolls but… quite marvelous.”

I went back in time to the Sonatina (1953), first recorded by Mel on Vanguard and recorded again in 1989 by a pianist named Delores Stevens.

I was surprised at how accurately I remembered it. It is an exquisite piece of music, strangely serene. It is from the time of Mel’s studies with Hindemith, but I cannot see it as neo-classical except in the constant discretion of its choices and in the same sense that Ravel was Mozartean. It puts me in mind not of the classical period so much as the “modern” French, while in its American quality, it faintly evokes Charles Tomlinson Griffes, or perhaps what Griffes might have done and been had he lived longer. It is more severe than Griffes, more mature, less sentimental.

And so back to the Goodman band, and the charts Mel wrote, many of them available again through the CD reissues on CBS. They are wonderful. They remain as fresh as when they were written. And he was apparently churning the stuff out then, utterly prolific. His playing is exuberant, exultant, laughing, and inventive. Then comes the diminuendo of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Vanguard records, and at last tacet, at least from that Mel Powell.

And then the 1987 burst-out, the cruise on the Norway, some of which is to be heard on the Chiaroscuro album The Return of Mel Powell. This too is delightful stuff, his interplays with Benny Carter, Howard Alden, Milt Hinton, and Louis Bellson. It’s loose, it’s unrehearsed, and happy.

It is as if sometime around 1959, Mel Powell shoved his ship into warp drive and accelerated past the red shift and vanished, leaving on the retina a faint after-image of Stardust, the memory of years gone by. “The Earl,” to Moscow,” World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” Then, suddenly, in 1987, he reappears, playing those lines in octaves, trying for long ski-slope runs and bringing them off, embracing ecstasy and laughing all the way. The music hasn’t aged. Einstein was right.

I make my usual mistake. I long for a perfect world.

On 31 October 1990, there was a performance of his works in tribute to Mel Powell in the Terrace Theater of the Kennedy Center in Washington. Mel was in the audience.

I try to step back and look at all the worlds of Mel Powell, peanut salesman, baseball buff, jazz musician, composer, teacher, raconteur, wit, the kid reading Debussy manuscripts, the white-haired wise professor.

Wow.”

[Mel Powell died on 24 April 1998. He was 75.]