What was Gil Mellé doing in 1959?

1959 has been noted by many as one of the greatest years in jazz history, maybe the greatest.

If you look online you'll see a lot of lists of great jazz albums that were released in 1959. Some lists have up to 10 albums, and those 10 can vary from list to list, but the 4 albums showcased in the video are in them all. They all agree though that 1959 was a golden year for jazz regardless of what gems are picked.

I’d like to say that 1959 was also a blockbuster year in model railroading. It doesn’t appear to be, but there were a few important articles published in Model Railroader that showcased important directions in the hobby for scratchbuilders, especially for those interested in structures and scenery like Mellé:

The Strathmore Story, William J. Clouser, Feb ’59

Laminated Styrofoam Scenery, William E. Eckhardt, Sept ’59

The case for styrene (Part 1), Alan B. Armitage, Nov ’59

The case for styrene (Part 2 - Conclusion), Alan B. Armitage, Dec ’59

So what was Gil Mellé doing in 1959? 

In Aaron Steinberg’s interesting 2002 JazzTimes interview with Gil Mellé there’s this intriguing paragraph that appears in a discussion of where Mellé’s music and painting careers were going in the mid to late 1950s:

At the same time he was starting to have success with his visual art, his increasingly idiosyncratic music was confusing and shrinking his audience. “Nobody knew what the hell I was doing,” Mellé says. Record sales continued to lag with each recording. Then Mellé did something that made things much, much worse. “That’s the point at which I got into electronic music. Then [my audience] really didn’t understand me. Electronic music in ’59? That wasn’t music.”

Elektar, 1960; Source: JazzTimes

Intriguing and infuriating. That’s the only mention of 1959 in the article, and the implication, ok, well, more than an implication, an outright statement from Mellé that he was seriously experimenting with electronic music in 1959. As well, in the pictures accompanying the article there’s a photo of a device called an ‘Elektar’ dated 1960. What is it? A guitar amplifier? Some sort of electronic guitar simulation device? Something else? It’s infuriating that the article doesn’t discuss any of the devices shown in the pictures. I know nothing about the roots of electronic music beyond a taste for Switched-On Bach, but, if I take the interview at face value, Mellé was working on electronic musical devices in 1959, and his first appears to be one called the ‘Elektar’, which was made in 1960. 

We also know from ads in 1958 and 1959 issues of Model Railroader that Mellé was running his model structures company, Industrial Model Works, at the same time he was experimenting with electronic music. Then later in 1960 his first articles in Railroad Model Craftsman were published. So, it looks like it was a very creative period for Mellé. Maybe he was at work on his paintings too? Now, maybe Mellé’s apparent musical sabbatical in New Jersey is not as well known as Sonny Rollins 1959 to 1961 one where he famously practiced his saxophone out on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge everyday, but like Rollins, there was something developing.

You’ve got to take the above with a grain-of-salt. I do. I’ve corroborated nothing. So far it’s just a string of interesting factoids, with the emphasis on interesting, and lots of questions about their factualness. In other words, the search continues.