10-inchers and the 12-inch LP Patterns in Jazz for Blue Note, all reissued on CD as The Complete Blue Note ’50s Sessions; three records for Prestige, Primitive Modern, Gil’s Guests and Quadrama-must sound thoroughly grounded in the cool school. Mellé played baritone with a graceful lightness and a vibratoless tone, and his music, even in driving moments, has a cool distance to it, not announcing itself in broad gestures but insinuating with peculiar details.
Mellé’s oddities begin with some of the very first songs he recorded. On “Four Moons”-one of a host of Mellé originals with astrology/astronomy titles that turn up on the Blue Note sides-Monica Dell adds a spacey, low-moan scat so bizarre that it seems to anticipate the intergalactic chants of Sun Ra. Mellé’s interest in classical composition-Bartók in particular-surfaced in 1955 with the complexly structured suite “Five Impressions of Color” (from the last Blue Note 10-inch) and the almost narrative “Ghengis” from Gil’s Guests (1956).
“I was into translating Bartók’s architectonic thinking into jazz,” Mellé says. “There are movements and sections that Bartók wrote that have a pulse like you wouldn’t believe. They really move. And I thought, ‘My God, if I can just rethink this and make it work within a jazz composition.”
The music Mellé made for Prestige is not only more rich, confidant and fully realized than his Blue Note work, it’s also more densely populated with unexpected twists and turns. The creative firecrackers threaded into the recordings give the music an almost casual air of the avant-garde. Consider, for example, “Ironworks” from Primitive Modern (1956): Ed Thigpen uses an unorthodox drum kit that is expanded to accommodate large pieces of piping, which gives him a machine-shop sound, and there’s a unexpected break in the tune where the whole band drops out save Cinderella, who emits a beam of abstract sound-a totally static moment and an early echo of Mellé’s future in electronic music.
“I wasn’t playing bebop,” Mellé says. “And for that matter, neither was Monk, neither was George Russell, neither was Teddy Charles, neither was Lennie Tristano. There were some of us who had a little more respect for Bird and Diz and Miles than to just imitate them-steal their lines-which is what everyone was doing. We just picked our own direction.”
By this time Mellé’s own directions were several. Alfred Lion liked Mellé’s artwork enough that he encouraged the saxophonist to design his own album covers from the start. “Alfred was like a second father to me. He took me to museums, the MOMA, the Guggenheim and all these places I had never been. We went to see a lot of foreign films. He gave me a peek over the pigsty, which is what Jersey was. That changed my life.”
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