Mel Powell, Pure Music

Mel Powell was a very good composer. But that is something easy to overlook in remembering the man who became the first dean of music at the California Institute of the Arts and who did more than his share to give the often unfettered arts college credibility and class in his three-decade tenure there.

Powell, who died Friday morning from liver cancer, less than three months after his 75th birthday, was more loved and better known than his music.

The reason for that is simple. Powell was a big man with a big personality. His music was mostly small in scale, subtle, difficult and a bit dry.

Powell’s following among his students will go down as the stuff of local legend. He was tall and athletic, until muscular dystrophy forced him to rely upon a cane and, eventually, a wheelchair. He had an orator’s voice and a marvelous ability to tell a story. When he turned up at a concert, one would hear all around, “Mel’s here,” and he would be instantly surrounded. Laughter accompanied him, despite the physical suffering. Good-natured curmudgeonliness was not, in him, a contradiction. “Were there not a Mel Powell,” his close friend and colleague Milton Babbitt has quipped, “we would not dare to invent him.”

Powell lived his life in the shadow of an early fame, which had seemingly little to do with the music he wrote for half a century. Though a classically trained pianist with ambitions for a concert career, he joined the Benny Goodman band when he was 18, in the years just before World War II, when Goodman’s popularity was at its height. Powell couldn’t help but share in the glory. There was talk that he could become one of the jazz greats. But band life didn’t sustain him musically, and he dropped out in 1942, after just two years.

The Army called, and that led to more jazz when he was asked to play in the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band. It also proved nearly as perilous as the battlefield. On Dec. 15, 1944, Miller set out in a small plane from England to Paris for a performance, and Powell along with some other band members were to accompany him. But the weather was bad and Miller, phobic about flying, thought it would be safer were the plane not loaded down with extra passengers. Powell stayed behind. The plane disappeared.

Powell’s jazz career didn’t long outlive Army life. And after an unstimulating year in Hollywood scoring films, he enrolled at Yale to study with Paul Hindemith. Academic life, writing music for a small, sophisticated audience and teaching seemed to suit Powell fine; he never indicated in interviews or profiles that he missed his teenage glory.

Indeed, Powell even managed to develop the reputation as an elitist. In 1970, shortly after moving to Los Angeles to teach at CalArts, Powell had a piece for orchestra and tape, “Immobiles I-IV,” programmed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and a scandal broke out. The concert was an event. It was held at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion and it included an experimental collaboration between Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and the Philharmonic, before an audience of 14,000.

The “Immobiles” came first, but a disconnected wire forced the performance to be interrupted. It was announced that the piece would be held until after intermission, to allow time to fix the problem. But horrified by Zappa and the circus atmosphere, Powell withdrew his music and stormed out. “Serious new music, like serious old music,” he later wrote in the Sunday Calendar, “isn’t made to be dribbled around in a basketball arena.”

The Times was besieged by letters. Readers commended Powell for his bravery to buck the freewheeling ‘60s. “The idea of egalitarianism, lovely and humane within the world of political and social structures, becomes foolish in connection with the high art of music,” Powell had concluded. Others were deeply offended by both his actions and words.

Powell’s point is surely less popular today than it was then, but he was right that his music couldn’t survive such an environment. It is delicate stuff, very clean, concise and carefully detailed. This was no longer the Powell who had once adored playing popular music for large, adoring audiences.

But, in fact, Powell’s two sides may not have been quite so far apart as they then seemed. In the late ‘80s, Powell began playing jazz again for fund-raisers and on jazz cruises, and in 1987, Whitney Balliett wrote a profile of him for the New Yorker that described what Powell’s jazz playing had once been like.

“His touch was oblique and dancing,” Balliett observed. “Powell’s fast solos steamed. His single-note lines, decorated with little tremolos, flashed. His chords jumped three steps at a time . . . His slow solos were delicate and exploratory. He would examine every facet of the original melody in a leisurely, behind-the-beat Billie Holiday manner, turning it this way and that, holding it to the light, testing its beauty and strength.”

That describes just about perfectly the piano writing in Powell’s largest and most important serious work, “Duplicates,” a concerto for two pianos commissioned by Betty Freeman for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. The music is not jazz and sounds nothing like it. It is abstract, ever so exquisitely made and colored (a recording of it is on Harmonia Mundi), full of fantasy and imagination.

“Duplicates” is the embodiment of Powell’s quest for a pure music. He once said: “Music, just music, nothing more, beautifully composed, beautifully performed, free from parody, satire, political commentary, pandering--for me that remains more powerful than all the rest.”