Gil Melle - Primitive Modern/Quadrama (Prestige)

Even by musicanly standards Gil Melle’s ego stretches capacious borders. The odor of the impresario is redolent throughout the self-penned liners to his Complete Blue Note Recordings (now lamentably out of print). In those pages he boldly claims ownership to a number of precedents: first Caucasian musician signed to Blue Note as a leader; inventor of the first prototype drum machine; first to incorporate electronics into a jazz setting through his pioneering ensemble the Electronauts; etc. All are boasts that whether true or false can’t help but carry a stale air of hucksterism. The notes to Primitive Modern are similarly pedantic, but they go into far greater detail toward substantiating Melle’s declarations of grandeur. His sage name-drops of Bartok, Lars Gullin and Herbie Nichols are not idle avowals. The music on the album and Quadrama, its companion in this two-fer, make a case for his prestigious musical place in unequivocal terms.

Melle’s modus is essentially one of potentially jarring juxtapositions: jazz swing with classical consonance and dissonance; simplified rhythmic meters with complex harmonic and melodic patterns, vice versa, and so on. The outcome of these cunning stabs at seemingly-incongruous synthesis is a portfolio of compositions that still possesses the ability to surprise and stimulate nearly a half century after its scripting. Outside the athletic oration of Melle’s throaty baritone saxophone, the chief reason for the albums’ success resides in the supporting cast assembled for the recording dates. Guitarist Joe Cinderella is an unsung revelation. His advanced harmonic sense equals any contemporaneous plectrist from Raney to Farlow on down and it’s combined with chance-taking brio and tonal incisiveness that make tracks like the intricate, rabbit-paced “Ironworks” such memorable excursions. Ed Thigpen’s eloquent showing on traps is strong point too. The accents and textures he achieves on the opening “Dominica,” augmenting his kit with various Melle-designed percussive devices to create an orchestral sound enhanced with surprising moments of dissonance, give the tune a forward-thinking resonance on par with the best Third Stream experiments of the era. Bassist Billy Phillips completes the group, unobtrusively shaping arco and pizz patterns that augment the unshakeable modernity of his colleagues.

A year later Melle hired session pros George Duvivier and Shadow Wilson for Quadrama with confrere Cinderella returning to the guitar stool. While not quite on the same rung of originality as its predecessor, thanks mostly to Melle’s mixing a pair of (beautifully-tweaked) Ellington standards with his own challenging pieces, the session still stacks favorably with the most adventurous jazz of the ’50s. Melle’s sojourn as a jazzman ended up relatively short-lived as he soon became distracted by full-time forays into the visual arts (both albums here showcase his own striking cover art conceptions). The urge to ponder what he would have come up with had he continued to rudder a jazz course is powerful. These early efforts remain vital representative heirlooms of a man who made it his mission to prove the pliable nature of the parameters of jazz.

[for a different take on the disc check out this Ron Wynn review]