Gil Mellé

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Gilbert John "Gil" Mellé (born December 31, 1931 in New York City , † October 28, 2004 in Malibu , California ) was an American visual artist, jazz musician ( baritone saxophone , tenor saxophone and keyboard instruments) and film composer . He also created the cover art for early albums by Miles Davis , Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins .

Live and act

Mellé collected records by Duke Ellington as a teenager before turning to Thelonious Monk's music. He also painted. After military service he worked as a visual artist. In the 1950s, Mellé's paintings and sculptures were exhibited in New York galleries. He also played in jazz clubs . Between 1952 and 1957 he recorded a number of albums under his own name, initially for Blue Note Records (he was the first white jazz musician to be under contract with them). At Blue Note he was one of the three graphic artists who designed record covers for the label. He also put the label in contact with the outstanding sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder . After four EPs he switched to Prestige Records , for which he recorded albums such as Primitive Modern , Quadrama and Gil's Guests . He performed with his own formation at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, where his band was recognized as the most promising of the year. In addition to his own groups, which Eddie Bert often belonged to, he played with George Wallington , Max Roach , Tal Farlow , Oscar Pettiford , Ed Thigpen , Kenny Dorham and Zoot Sims .

In his Third Stream experiments, Mellé integrated elements of European classical modernism by Edgar Varèse and Béla Bartók with the modern jazz of Herbie Nichols to create “something more than hard bop” by expanding the parameters of the standardized jazz form. His playing on the baritone saxophone is reminiscent of Lars Gullin .

He moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s . As a composer for film and television, Mellé was one of the first to use electronic instruments that he constructed himself. He was the first to compose an exclusively electronically generated title theme for a television series ( Rod Serlings Night Gallery ). At the 1967 Monterey Jazz Festival , he performed with the first all-electronic jazz group, The Electronauts , and released his first all-electronic jazz album, Tome VI , on Verve Records the following year . In total, he created the music for 125 films, including My Sweet Charlie , Andromeda - Tödlicher Staub aus dem All (nominated for the Golden Globe Award / Best Film Music ), The Judge and Jake Wyler , various episodes of the TV series Columbo , Frankenstein: The True Story and The Six Million Dollar Man .

Selection discography

Filmography (selection)

  • 1971: Andromeda - Deadly Dust from Space (The Andromeda Strain)
  • 1971: The Organization
  • 1972: Delivered (You'll Like My Mother)
  • 1972: That Certain Summer
  • 1973: A Cold Night's Death
  • 1973: Frankenstein as he really was (Frankenstein: The True Story)
  • 1974: An android is hunted (The Questor Tapes)
  • 1975: New York no longer responds (The Ultimate Warrior)
  • 1975: Death Scream
  • 1976: The Brood of Evil ( Embryo )
  • 1977: Witches' Sabbath (The Sentinel)
  • 1977: Starship Invasions (Starship Invasions)
  • 1979: White Slave of the Green Hell (Gold of the Amazon Women)
  • 1980: The Curse of King Tut's Tomb
  • 1980: The Grenzwolf (Borderline)
  • 1980: Rape and Marriage: The Rideout Case
  • 1982: World War 3 (World War III)
  • 1983: Through Naked Eyes
  • 1984: A Woman Can't Forget (Sweet Revenge)
  • 1984: I'm not a murderer (Fatal Vision)
  • 1984: Under Suspicion (Best Kept Secrets)
  • 1985: The Girl from Another Star (Starcrossed)
  • 1986: The Deliberate Stranger
  • 1986: Killer in the Mirror
  • 1988: 847 - The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story
  • 1989: The Case of the Hillside Stranglers
  • 1990: Killer Clan (So ​​Proudly We Hail)
  • 1990: Dirty Pact (Good Cops, Bad Cops)
  • 1993: Call of Death (Night Owl)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard Cook : Blue Note Records: The Biography . 2003, p. 48f.
  2. ^ Gordon Jack: Fifties jazz talk: an oral retrospective . 2004, pp. 36, 39
  3. ↑ cit. after Cook & Morton
  4. ↑ Gil Melle: Blue Note and Prestige ( Memento from July 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ See Max Harrison et al. a .: The Essential Jazz Records: Modernism to postmodernism . 2000, p. 628ff.
personal data
SURNAME Mellé, Gil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mellé, Gilbert John (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American visual artist, jazz musician (baritone saxophone, tenor saxophone and keyboard instruments) and film composer
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH October 28, 2004
Place of death Malibu , California