MEL POWELL: AWAKE AND WELL AFTER 4 DECADES

It is all but impossible to get a fix on Mel Powell.

To his students at CalArts in Valencia, he is the professor in whose classroom students are inculcated with an understanding of music through the centuries, from Palestrina to Poulenc to Powell.

To aspiring composers everywhere, he is the distinguished writer whose “Filigree Setting for String Quartet” in 1960 became a textbook piece and whose “Modules,” introduced by the Los Angeles Philharmonic last spring, will be given its European premiere in 1987 by Pierre Boulez.

There is, though, another, all but forgotten side to this multifaceted artist: He is the Rip Van Winkle of jazz. In fact, Powell, who rose to national attention in the Benny Goodman Orchestra in 1941-42, exceeded Winkle’s record of 20 years asleep: He recorded his last jazz session 31 years ago and, except for occasional flings at jazz, has been absent for four decades from the music that originally earned him national attention.

The event that brought this situation to an end was the fourth annual jazz festival aboard the Norway, this year subtitled “52nd Street Afloat.” In the course of two weeklong voyages from Miami, he renewed old associations and made new friends, becoming a born-again jazzman. A series of coming-out parties found him in the company of the hip elite.

Digging in as if the time warp had not existed, he jammed with Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, Ruby Braff, the Danish violinist Svend Asmussen; played two-piano duets with Makoto Ozone and Dick Hyman and accompanied Joe Williams. The heady mix of Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson and Earl Hines that had marked his early work with Benny Goodman was undiluted by the years.

Before each set, Powell would regale his audience with a prologue that often ran to 10 minutes. His professorial manner and precise diction were counterbalanced by a mordant wit and richly anecdotal style. Once, asked why he had chosen the cruise ship for his first jazz tour in 40 years, he said: ‘It was quite fortuitous. You see, I resume playing jazz every 40 years.”

Why was Powell away from jazz so long? He left it, he said, because much as he respects the jazz composers, he feels it is primarily a player’s art form, so he turned to a composer’s art.

But why did he choose this occasion to emerge?

“A couple of reasons,” he said. “I was giving a lecture at CalArts in which I wanted to point out the rhythmic effectiveness in a Palestrina motet. I said, ‘This hurrying, this anticipation of the beat, is very characteristic of American jazz.’

“Some kid then raised his hand and said: ‘Prof. Powell, I’m curious. How did you know this about American jazz?’ Well, I drew back in a state of shock. I replied: ‘Your professor is an old-time ragtime player. The question should have been, How do I know that much about the 16th Century?’

“That incident shook me up, and along with it I had a series of calls from Hank O’Neal, who puts the Norway cruises together. I’d been doing what I was doing for a very long time; the idea of getting away and seeing old friends appealed to me. So it was a test, and sort of a lark.”

Powell walks with difficulty; four years ago, a series of unexplained falls was eventually diagnosed as muscular dystrophy. His references to the disability (which causes no pain and has not affected his hands) are invariably jocular: “I’m one of Jerry Lewis’s kids.”

Mobility problems aside, Powell differs little from the handsome young prodigy who graduated from high school at 14 and was praised at 15 by Art Tatum after sitting in with Sidney Bechet at Nick’s in Greenwich Village.

He was 18, and had racked up credits with Bobby Hackett, Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier and a record date with Wingy Manone, when Goodman dropped in at Nick’s one night and hired him. After a year. he joined Raymond Scott’s CBS band briefly, until the draft claimed him. Wartime service did not interrupt his playing, since Glenn Miller tapped him for a piano-and-arranger role in his Army Air Force orchestra, which resided at length in England.

“Glenn had me writing not only for a jazz unit called Uptown Hall but also for a concert group using the string musicians. This made a sort of reversion to my youth, my eight years of training in so-called serious music.”

Back from Europe and restored to civilian life, Powell went to 52nd Street to catch up with the new movements (“I found Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker utterly incomprehensible at first”). In 1946, he married actress Martha Scott (after 40 years, they’re still together), put in time as a composer/arranger at MGM, then went back East and studied composition at Yale University, where he began a long and close association with Paul Hindemith.

“After I’d worked with Hindemith for three or four years as a student, he chose me to be his associate; I was a lecturer and assistant professor. Then Hindemith went home to Germany. I was the Young Turk on the faculty; students flocked to me because I knew all about Webern and the dernier cri people, while the older guys were still mainly involved with Stravinsky and Bartok. Schoenberg and atonal music were now of major interest. So the dean appointed me chairman of the composition faculty.”

Powell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960. Though the next few years kept him busy composing, studying and preparing lectures, in retrospect he regards the Yale experience as less than completely fulfilling.

“I had a long run, about 15 years. It ended when some men came to tell me about an extraordinary complex they were building in Southern California devoted entirely to the arts. They wanted Aaron Copland to form the music school; he turned it down but recommended me. The timing was perfect.”

Martha Scott, who had visited the West Coast for “Our Town” and other movies, shared Powell’s enthusiasm. Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, did not. On being told that Powell would leave in a year, he reacted with what Powell calls “this real Northeastern, Yankee view of Los Angeles. He didn’t believe I’d stay, and even offered to keep my position open.”

CalArts was founded in 1969, with Powell as the founding dean of the music school.

“The charming part, which seduced us all at first,” he recalls, “was that whereas at Yale I’d be sitting at lunch with a physicist or a biologist, now it would be a playwright, a choreographer, a film maker.” But political tensions arose. The trustees’ viewpoint, he felt, leaned to the right while that of the students and faculty tended leftward. The original president and provost suddenly were out, leaving the group, in Powell’s word, “acephalous.” He was asked to become provost, “with five deans around--all deans being equal, but one a little more equal than the others.”

Powell brought to CalArts several innovations, some of which he established, he says, because they were simply logical; for example, at a performance, students would play with teachers. “If a kid who’s learning to play the violin finds himself sitting next to George Szell’s former concertmaster, what better way is there to learn? It’s equivalent to having a young trumpeter sitting next to Dizzy.”

By 1976, he felt that his role as an administrator had been fulfilled. “Everyone was very happy except me, because I’d lost sight of my purpose for coming out here, which was not simply to be dean but to continue my career as a composer. So ever since 1976, I’ve been a member of the faculty and I have the Roy E. Disney-endowed first chair of music composition.”

Throughout all the years at Yale and CalArts, there have been occasional brief flings in jazz: a series of record dates for Vanguard in the mid-1950s and jobs with Benny Goodman whenever Goodman was in a bind.

The only serious venture into jazz composing since his prewar days came about in 1982, after his daughter Mary insisted that he listen to the Maiden Voyage big band at a local club.

“There is something about a big swing band sound that is unlike anything else in the world, and these women amazed me. Here was this lead trumpet player (Louise Baranger), a pretty blonde who’s sitting there popping out these high C’s and D’s. I reflected how many big-name bands that made zillions of dollars would have been blown off the stage by these people.”

Powell arranged for the band to play at CalArts’ Contemporary Music Festival, and for the occasion wrote a three-movement suite, “Setting for Jazz Band.”

Aside from such isolated incidents, he remained secluded from the jazz world until last month. Now that the ice has been broken, will he consider a broader, bolder step back into jazz?

Powell hesitated. “I doubt it. Of course, it was an encouraging experience, and the things people like Dizzy and Clark Terry and Joe Williams said to me were memorable. But it really requires a different mind-cast; you have to turn one faucet off and turn on another. However, I will say this: I’ve already promised Hank O’Neal that I wouldn’t turn down an offer for next year’s cruise. So maybe instead of these 40-year gaps, we can cut it down to a year.”