The Powell & the Glory

Even as a youngster in The Bronx, Mel Powell was a brilliantly advanced musician. At least that is the way he remembers it. Of course, his fledgling compositions did not exactly bowl over his piano teacher, who "seemed to prefer Mozart." But it was already clear that Powell was something special. He completed high school at 14, and started a precocious career playing jazz piano. "It turned out," he recalls, with barely a smile of irony, "that I became magnificent."

Apparently he did, for soon he was sitting in with top jazzmen in Greenwich Village. He was only 18 when Benny Goodman offered him a job in 1941. Powell says: "I did him the courtesy of accepting." Goodman remembers it a little differently: "He auditioned for me in a cubicle at my manager's office. He was so scared that I had to ask a secretary to help me decide whether he was any good--I couldn't tell." Anyway, that is the way that most people who know his name remember Powell--as a vital, imaginative soloist with Goodman and later with Glenn Miller.

Twittering & Rumbling. Today he is chairman of the composition faculty at the Yale Music School and an influential experimentalist in modern music. It seems hard to believe, but it is the same Powell--same impressive talent, same capacity for being impressed by it himself. Take, for example, the series of electronic pieces that he recently presented in a special concert at the Electric Circus, a Manhattan discotheque. It was more carefully planned and carried out than most such performances, and it amounted to a kaleidoscope of the new Powell music. There were shim mering, post-Webern instrumental sonorities, crackling percussion, taped voices, and electronic twittering and rumbling--all interspersed with theatrical episodes such as a bearded man bouncing on a trampoline under flickering strobe lights.

It was the sort of work that Powell's colleague, Gunther Schuller, praises for "its fine, subtle detail--like Japanese calligraphy--which finally works up into a large, successful structure." Typically, Powell goes Schuller one better. One brief set of the pieces, he says, "can sound like The Ring of the Nibelung and can seem to last four days."

Powell's progress from jazz to the avant-garde followed an improbable path. He married Actress Martha Scott after World War II, then decided to leave the insecure jazz life and settle in Hollywood as a studio pianist for MGM. One of his major assignments was recording backgrounds for Tom and Jerry cartoons. At first, the constant glissandos of cartoon music put blisters on his knuckles, but a fellow studio pianist, Andre Previn, showed him how to play them with a comb. Meanwhile, Powell pursued his studies in serious music. In 1948 he moved east to study composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. By 1958, when he was offered a professorship, he was already noted as a deft, if sometimes perplexing, composer for conventional instruments. His final step into machine-made sounds was only logical: many of his ideas became too difficult for humans to play.

Powell is obviously a long way from appealing to the mass audience that applauded his jazz piano in the '40s. "My public now," he says, "is the 250 people who come to hear my works along with those of other avant-garde composers." Still, he could hardly ask for a more appreciative audience than those 250 people--or rather, 251.

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