Biography
Gil Melle demonstrated remarkable breadth as an artist and innovator, starting out as a post-bop baritone saxophonist who also wrote compositions and created visual art before expanding into numerous other creative and technical domains. Fairly soon after beginning, he stepped away from jazz to focus on writing music for movies and television while exploring electronic sounds. His work blended jazz influences, especially those of Duke Ellington, with classical elements in a style he labeled “primitive modern.” A sequence of late-’50s releases on Blue Note and Prestige showcased that approach. Although Melle issued albums only occasionally thereafter, he remained intensely active in scoring projects, advancing electronic music, constructing custom computers and synthesizers, producing paintings, flying aircraft, restoring cars and planes, and maintaining a collection of antique microscopical instruments.
Born in New York City, Melle grew up under the care of a family friend following his parents’ abandonment when he was two. He took up painting in childhood, earning several national competition prizes before his teenage years, and began playing saxophone as a teen. By age sixteen he was already performing in Greenwich Village jazz clubs. At nineteen he became the first white musician signed to Blue Note, issuing five 10-inch discs before delivering his initial 12-inch LP, Patterns in Jazz, in 1956. While recording and playing jazz, he sustained his visual-art practice, exhibiting paintings and sculptures in New York galleries and supplying cover artwork for his own records plus releases by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk. Shortly after the Patterns in Jazz dates he departed Blue Note for Prestige, where between 1956 and 1957 he completed three albums—Primitive Modern, Gil’s Guests, and Quadrama—before ending his work as a conventional jazz bandleader.
In the ’60s Melle relocated to Los Angeles and turned to scoring films and television programs. Across the following three decades he supplied music for more than 125 productions. Simultaneously he immersed himself in electronic music, designing his own synthesizers—one of which was arguably the first drum machine—and appearing with the Electronauts, the first all-electronic jazz ensemble, at the tenth Monterey Jazz Festival. He reentered the recording studio in 1967 with the all-electronic jazz album Tome VI on Verve. Continuing to break ground electronically, he created the scores for Night Gallery and The Andromeda Strain using only synthesizers, an innovation at the time. Beyond film work he wrote several symphonies that received performances by orchestras in Toronto, London, and New Zealand.
By the mid-’90s Melle chose to devote himself chiefly to visual art, particularly computer-generated digital painting that earned widespread praise from critics throughout the United States. Gil Melle died of a heart attack at his Malibu, California home on October 28, 2004.
Born in New York City, Melle grew up under the care of a family friend following his parents’ abandonment when he was two. He took up painting in childhood, earning several national competition prizes before his teenage years, and began playing saxophone as a teen. By age sixteen he was already performing in Greenwich Village jazz clubs. At nineteen he became the first white musician signed to Blue Note, issuing five 10-inch discs before delivering his initial 12-inch LP, Patterns in Jazz, in 1956. While recording and playing jazz, he sustained his visual-art practice, exhibiting paintings and sculptures in New York galleries and supplying cover artwork for his own records plus releases by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk. Shortly after the Patterns in Jazz dates he departed Blue Note for Prestige, where between 1956 and 1957 he completed three albums—Primitive Modern, Gil’s Guests, and Quadrama—before ending his work as a conventional jazz bandleader.
In the ’60s Melle relocated to Los Angeles and turned to scoring films and television programs. Across the following three decades he supplied music for more than 125 productions. Simultaneously he immersed himself in electronic music, designing his own synthesizers—one of which was arguably the first drum machine—and appearing with the Electronauts, the first all-electronic jazz ensemble, at the tenth Monterey Jazz Festival. He reentered the recording studio in 1967 with the all-electronic jazz album Tome VI on Verve. Continuing to break ground electronically, he created the scores for Night Gallery and The Andromeda Strain using only synthesizers, an innovation at the time. Beyond film work he wrote several symphonies that received performances by orchestras in Toronto, London, and New Zealand.
By the mid-’90s Melle chose to devote himself chiefly to visual art, particularly computer-generated digital painting that earned widespread praise from critics throughout the United States. Gil Melle died of a heart attack at his Malibu, California home on October 28, 2004.