Gil Mellé

A true renaissance man, Gil Melle began his career as a post-bop baritone saxophonist who also composed and painted, later branching out into a wide variety of artistic and scientific fields. He abandoned jazz fairly early on in his career, choosing to compose a number of film and television scores and experiment with electronic music instead. Then again, Melle's music wasn't strictly jazz -- it was a hybrid of jazz, drawn from Duke Ellington in particular, and classical music, which he called "primitive modern." That "primitive modern" music was on display on a series of albu...