Gil Mellé


Gilbert John Mellé was an American artist, jazz musician and film composer.

Life and career

In the 1950s, Mellé's paintings and sculptures were shown in New York City galleries and he created the cover art for albums by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. Mellé played the tenor and baritone saxophone with George Wallington, Max Roach, Tal Farlow, Oscar Pettiford, Ed Thigpen, Kenny Dorham and Zoot Sims, and led a number of sessions recorded for the Blue Note and Prestige labels between 1953 and 1957.
It was Mellé who introduced engineer Rudy Van Gelder to Alfred Lion, the Blue Note Records founder, in 1952. Lion had been impressed with the sound of Mellé's recordings, which were engineered by Van Gelder. Van Gelder was responsible for hundreds of recordings on Blue Note, virtually every session on the label from 1953 to 1967.
As a film and TV composer, Mellé was one of the first to use self-built electronic instruments, either alone or as an added voice among the string, wind, brass, and percussion sections of the orchestra. He was the first to compose a main theme for an American television series arranged entirely for electronic instruments.
His credits spanned over 100 film works including The Andromeda Strain, The Organization, Bone, You'll Like My Mother, The Savage is Loose, The Ultimate Warrior, Embryo, The Sentinel, Starship Invasions, Borderline, Blood Beach and The Last Chase, and TV movies such as My Sweet Charlie, That Certain Summer, The Judge and Jake Wyler, A Cold Night's Death, The President's Plane Is Missing, ', The Questor Tapes, Killdozer!, Death Scream, A Vacation in Hell, The Curse of King Tut's Tomb and World War III. He provided music for four episodes of NBC's Columbo and composed the theme music for the series, '.
Mellé died of a heart attack at his home in Malibu, California in October 2004.

Discography

As composer and arranger

Television series