Affectionate EAR tribute to the challenging Powell

Mel Powell’s early career resembled that of his contemporary Nat “King” Cole. Both were terrific, light-fingered jazz pianists touched with genius, and both veered away from jazz in the late 1940s. But while Cole zeroed in on the pop mainstream with his honeyed vocals, Powell went completely the other way, writing intricate, delicate, abstract, thoroughly atonal compositions that were about as far away from the hit parade as one could get.

Eventually, Powell’s brand of serialism became old hat even in academia, but he never wavered, continuing to cut his little gems, aware of his marginalization yet always taking it with good humor. Within CalArts, where he spent the last 30 years of his career, he inspired a lot of affection -- and that quality showed in every note of an all-Powell concert given Thursday night at REDCAT by the California EAR Unit.

Dotted with detailed performance instructions, Powell’s music is not easy to play, but even a whole evening of it can be surprisingly easy to listen to. He doesn’t overload the ear, instead doling out his refined rhetoric in short, fragmented modules.

The EAR Unit made things even easier by bracketing a succession of solo pieces -- “Invocation” and “AmyAbilities” (a pun on the name and talents of EAR Unit percussionist Amy Knoles) plus a Sonatine, Etude, Prelude and Setting -- with two larger works, “Immobiles Re-Mix” and a Sextet, that involved the entire ensemble. (All except the Etude are featured on a recent EAR Unit CD on New World.) Presented in this context, the stylistically unified solo pieces seemed like a series of recitatives leading up to the Sextet, which itself starts with a brief collection of short solo passages.

“Immobiles Re-Mix” was another story: a busy, burbling immersion in 1967-vintage electronics in which the original tape was fragmented and rechanneled by Knoles into 5.1 surround sound on a Mac PowerBook. During its performance, one of Powell’s watercolor/acrylic paintings was examined on a giant screen, where it eventually melted into a photograph of him.

Every detail of the music came through with stunning crystalline clarity within the REDCAT acoustics, and for old time’s sake, a familiar figure from CalArts’ past, Stephen “Lucky” Mosko, returned to conduct the Sextet. All that was missing, alas, was the presence of the genial, quick-witted composer, who died in 1998 at age 75.