Gil Mellé

This is the first album under Mellé’s name, and it came out at a moment when Blue Note was still figuring out what kind of label it was going to be. He was twenty-one, still playing tenor rather than the baritone he became known for, and writing his own material at a level that was already past most of his peers. The 10-inch format suits the music. Each track is compact, the ideas land quickly, and nothing overstays.

The personnel is impressive for a debut. Max Roach is on drums for the sextet side, which alone is a sign that the right people were paying attention. George Wallington at the piano gives the harmony real weight, and the sextet's front line of tenor, trombone, and vibraphone has a cool, slightly translucent sound that you do not hear on many other Blue Note dates from this era.

Mellé was already thinking like a composer rather than just a soloist with tunes. The pieces are arranged, with countermelodies and small voicing decisions that reward repeat listening. It is not an explosive record. It is a thoughtful one, which fits the player.

If you only know him from the Andromeda Strain soundtrack, this is where the story starts. The cerebral streak is already there. The synthesizers just had not been invented yet.

This is the Mellé record people remember. Patterns in Jazz came out as BLP 1517, early in Blue Note’s 12-inch 1500 series, which puts it near the start of one of the most important catalogs in jazz. He earned that placement. The compositions are tight, the playing is unfussy, and the band sounds like a unit that has been working together for years even though it was assembled for the date.

Joe Cinderella on guitar is the secret weapon. He is not a famous name, but he had a clean, melodic approach that fit Mellé’s writing perfectly. On the two longer tracks, "The Arab Barber Blues" and "Nice Question," the quartet stretches out and the guitar gives the music a different center of gravity than horn-led hard bop. Oscar Pettiford and Ed Thigpen handle the rhythm with intelligence and restraint.

Eddie Bert returns on trombone for the shorter pieces, and the addition of a second horn shifts the music toward something closer to a chamber-jazz feel. Mellé’s baritone in this setting is darker and warmer than the tenor he played on the 10-inch debut. He had grown into the new instrument.

If you are starting with Mellé, start here. This is the record that proves the case for him as a composer first.

Begun the same month as Patterns in Jazz but for the other label, Primitive Modern strips the band down to a quartet. No trombone, no second horn, just baritone, guitar, bass, and drums. The result is more intimate and arguably more original, because there is nowhere for the writing to hide. Mellé’s compositional approach has to carry every minute.

It does. The pieces unfold with a patience that almost feels like classical chamber music, but the swing is still there underneath. "Dominica" is the standout, a long-lined melody that gives Joe Cinderella plenty of room to work. The guitar-baritone pairing produces a sound that is genuinely unusual for 1956, neither West Coast cool nor New York hard bop, just its own thing.

Bob Weinstock supervised the date, Rudy Van Gelder engineered it, so the sonics are exactly what you would expect from Prestige in that period. Warm room, instruments sitting in real space, no studio gloss. The record breathes.

This one took me a few listens to fully appreciate. The first time through it sounds almost too restrained. By the third or fourth pass it sounds like exactly what it wants to be.

The premise is in the title. Across two sessions Mellé brought in different guests, all serious musicians, and wrote material around what each lineup could do. The August 10 session features Art Farmer and Julius Watkins, which gives that group a French horn and trumpet color you almost never hear together. The August 24 date swaps in Kenny Dorham and adds Don Butterfield on tuba.

It is the closest thing Mellé ever made to a Mingus-style writer’s record. Different instrumental colors, different textures, all of it shaped by his compositions. The French horn and tuba parts in particular feel almost orchestral, written rather than just sketched.

If you treat the album as a sampler of approaches rather than a single statement, it makes more sense. He was clearly using these sessions to test ideas. The fact that he could pull together this many top players across two dates says something about how he was regarded by his peers, even if his public profile was always smaller than the talent suggested.

Worth hearing for the Dorham and Butterfield session alone. The combination of trumpet, alto, baritone, and tuba is one of the strangest and most successful sounds in the Prestige catalog.

Back to the quartet format, but with a better rhythm section. George Duvivier on bass and Shadow Wilson on drums are an upgrade in terms of pure sound. Duvivier has one of the warmest, most legible bass tones in 1950s jazz, and Wilson’s touch on the cymbals is closer to a brush painter than a percussionist. Joe Cinderella is back on guitar, where by now he is essentially Mellé’s closest musical collaborator.

Most of the seven tracks are Mellé originals, with two Ellington pieces tucked in. The Ellington choices are two of the most famous tunes in the book, "It Don't Mean a Thing" and "In a Sentimental Mood," and what makes them interesting is how Mellé rearranges the harmony to fit his quartet.

This is the most polished of the 1950s records and probably the one closest to what mainstream cool jazz sounded like in 1957. If Patterns in Jazz is the canonical pick, Quadrama is the underrated one, less obviously ambitious but more refined in execution.

It would also turn out to be the last small-group jazz record Mellé would make for over a decade. He spent much of the next ten years building the electronic instruments that would define the next phase of his career.

After a decade away from leading his own jazz dates, Mellé came back with this. Tome VI is one of the first jazz records to use electronics as a full part of the band rather than as an overdubbed gimmick. The Jazz Electronauts were a real working group, and the electronic instruments were being played live in the room, not pre-recorded on tape and triggered later.

That distinction matters. In 1968 most electronic music meant a composer assembling a piece on a tape machine in a studio. Mellé wanted to improvise on electronics the way you would improvise on a saxophone. The effects generator, the Doomsday Machine, the Electar, all of it is being responded to by other players in real time.

The result is a record that does not quite sound like anything else from that year. It has the loose structure of late-1960s jazz exploration, but the timbres are unfamiliar enough that the music never settles into a known idiom. He also switched to soprano sax for most of the record, which changes the whole tonal center.

Worth hearing for the historical importance alone, but the playing is genuinely good. This is not just an experiment. It is a band finding a sound.

Waterbirds is technically a compilation of music Mellé wrote for various TV and film projects, but it plays like a fully sequenced album. The two title tracks come from a 1970 episode of the NBC show Then Came Bronson called "Forest Primeval." Other pieces are pulled from the soundtrack to a Jerry Freedman documentary about the Watts neighborhood, and from a TV movie called My Sweet Charlie.

The sound is spiritual jazz with electric instruments and homemade synthesis, somewhere between Pharoah Sanders and the Mizell brothers but with a science fiction undercurrent. The guitar sets up shimmering rhythmic beds, the Fender Rhodes adds atmosphere, and Mellé’s electronics and soprano weave through the top. Joe Cinderella is here again, fourteen years after Patterns in Jazz, which is a nice piece of continuity.

This is a cult record. Original Nocturne pressings are scarce and the album has been reissued by small specialist labels several times. It is worth tracking down. The fact that it was assembled from soundtrack cues does not weaken it. If anything the pacing benefits from each piece having its own visual reference point in Mellé’s head.

Many of the electronic textures here would show up again on Andromeda Strain the following year. Treat this as the dress rehearsal.

This is the record that puts Mellé in the history books on his own terms. The Andromeda Strain is one of the first all-electronic film scores. Robert Wise directed the movie, based on the Michael Crichton novel, and, as Mellé told it, asked for music with no themes, no chords and no harmonic structure. He delivered something that still sounds genuinely strange more than fifty years later.

Mellé built much of the gear himself. He invented an instrument he called the Percussotron, essentially the first percussive synthesizer, and used it to create the metallic, clicking textures that define the score.

The original LP was a ten-inch record cut into a hexagon and housed in a folded, pod-shaped sleeve, which is one of the great packaging concepts in soundtrack history. Original pressings in good condition trade for serious money now.

As a listening experience the score holds together without the film. It is sparse, alien, occasionally beautiful, and its sense of dread is something modern horror and science fiction composers have been borrowing from ever since. If you only own one Mellé record, it should probably be Patterns in Jazz. If you own two, this is the second.

Mindscape is a solo project in the most literal sense. Mellé wrote everything, programmed everything, played everything, designed the cover, took the photographs, recorded and mixed the album, and produced it. The only other names in the credits are Rudy Van Gelder, who mastered it, Wally Traugott, who cut the lacquer, and Freff, who wrote the liner notes. It is the closest thing to a one-man-band statement in his catalog.

The sound is closer to late-1980s synth-driven new age than to jazz. The technology had moved on from the analog gear of Andromeda Strain, and Mellé was using digital synths and sequencers to build long, slow-moving compositions that lean on texture more than melody. This is a different listen than the earlier electronic work.

Your reaction to this record probably depends on how you feel about the late-1980s synth aesthetic generally. The compositions are serious and the playing is thoughtful, but the timbres are very much of their time. Some listeners hear it as a meditation. Others hear it as period-piece new age. Both reactions are fair.

For Mellé completists it is essential context. For everyone else it is a curiosity that may or may not click depending on the day.

A note on the date: this is Mellé’s score for The Sentinel, the 1977 supernatural horror film directed by Michael Winner. The music sat unreleased for over four decades until La-La Land Records put it out in 2019 as a limited edition of 3,000 copies. Mellé himself died in 2004, so this is a posthumous release of a score he completed in the late 1970s.

The film is a deeply strange piece of late-1970s New York horror, with a cast that includes Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, John Carradine, and several established stars in small roles. The premise involves a Brooklyn brownstone that turns out to be a gateway to hell. Mellé’s score matches the tone: thick orchestral writing married to synthesizer textures, the same general toolkit he used for Andromeda Strain but now blended with a traditional film orchestra.

The strongest sections are the orchestral passages that build the religious dread the film keeps reaching for. The electronic cues do exactly what you would expect from a 1977 Mellé score: cold, alien, effective. The blend of the two is what makes it interesting. He had figured out by this point how to use the synthesizer as another section of the orchestra rather than as a separate world.

For listeners coming from the jazz records, this is a different Mellé. For listeners coming from Andromeda Strain, it is a logical next step in the same composer’s thinking. The La-La Land release is the first time the score has been available in full and high quality, and the booklet is worth the price on its own.