The Private Art of Thoroughly Modern Mel : Former jazz pianist and current academician is content to compose music that will be heard by a handful of people

Composer Mel Powell swings open the door to his Van Nuys studio, a dark sprawling room with every surface, including the top of a baby grand piano, buried under a morass of letters, books, manuscripts and score paper--most of it spread wide open.

Groaning bookcases contain everything from Gesualdo madrigals to full scores of Wagner operas. And an early model Macintosh computer hints of a thoroughly modern man who at times favors electronica over pens, ink and erasers.

“This is my playroom,” says the proud, make-no-excuses academic who, at 66, looks back on a career of teaching--first at Yale as the successor to Paul Hindemith and since 1969 at CalArts, as incumbent of the Disney-endowed chair in music composition. “It’s lovely. From early in the morning until the dark of night all I do is pursue what catches my fancy. Who knows the adventure or discovery a person might come upon here?”

The scene, circa 1940: A teen-aged Melvin Epstein hides in the restroom at Nick’s, a jazz club in downtown New York where he sits in on piano with Bobby Hackett, Eddie Condon and Sidney Bechet. Too young to join the union, he’s ducking officials who have come calling.

One night, after a set, the audience breaks into earthy applause--everyone but a large dour man who slowly claps one hand on the table. The young pianist is brought over to meet the seeming skeptic, who turns out to be Art Tatum. “You gonna be a real one,” he tells the youngster.

Tatum was right. Within months Benny Goodman comes by Nick’s and, marveling at the 16-year-old’s virtuosity, hires him as pianist and arranger. It is then that Melvin Epstein becomes Mel Powell, thrilled to be part of big band swing and “its sound of hungry lions coming at you with a lusty schrei .

“It was my good fortune to happen onto the jazz scene during its heyday,” he says now. “There are very few times in history when the best of art captures the mass imagination and thus achieves popularity. What transpired in America with jazz also was true in Italy, during Verdi’s lifetime. His operas were the day’s big popular events--not remotely the kind of private art that occupies today’s composers. It’s rare. I was lucky.”

The scene: spring, 1989. An elegant Brentwood garden party for 100 guests. The musical elite of Los Angeles settle into rows of white folding chairs for the formal part of an awards ceremony.

Powell, accepting an honorary lifetime membership from the Friends of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, has just been introduced. But he stays seated in his Mobie, an electric scooter chair, where earlier, he bantered with admirers in his best “sit-down comic” style.

No one would guess from his open-faced joviality that the man suffers a degenerative muscle disease, one that has begun to affect his hands as well as his legs. As he begins to speak, now in a more formal cast, his tones become patrician, professorial; they conjure the image of an almost-English don. Even here, though, humor finds its way to the urbane message.

The condition he suffers was originally diagnosed as muscular dystrophy. Its symptoms, afflicting Powell’s quadriceps or frontal thigh muscles, appeared suddenly in 1982. He confesses that the major loss he suffered was his tennis game--”an addiction I shared with Schoenberg but not one that brought me invitations to Wimbledon,” he says self-mockingly.

“Now I’ve turned myself over to the rheumatology department at UCLA, as a guinea pig. I take whole drawers of medication including steroids, but the working diagnosis has been changed to all-body-inclusive myesitis.” His longtime colleague Nick England says that the additional hand symptom “was frightening--as it possibly signals the end of his piano performance--but it has been arrested with treatment and the ruling out of muscular dystrophy is good news. Still, the whole thing is a crap-shoot.”

Powell doesn’t complain about his illness. Or about the small audiences for the type of austere, non-populist music he writes. His challenge lies in the realm of “non-consensual” music, a place where anarchy reigns, where one can discern no common theme, no steady beat, no compelling cadence.

(Examples of his music can be heard next Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. on KUSC-FM (91.5), when Gail Eichenthal hosts “My Lunch With Mel: An American Musical Feast,” aired nationally by American Public Radio as part of American Music Week.)

Why, many ask, has Mel Powell entered the monastery of his “private art”? And why has he seemingly forsaken his American heritage--jazz--to chase a European tradition, one that embraces an arcane post-Schoenbergianism and alienates all but a precious few followers?

Musicologist Leonard Stein has an answer of sorts.

“Each piece Mel writes is a revelation,” he says, “never a repeat of an earlier challenge.” In a sense, always looking for the next challenge defines Mel Powell’s manifold careers.

And then there’s what he calls “the bitch goddess of my past, the great pacifier,” which brought glamour and acclaim. In his swing heyday, he earned an astounding $25,000 a year, which enabled him to stay at hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria and support his Depression-poor family. “But playing the same tunes and arrangements night after night became routine,” he recalls.

Drafted into the service during World War II, Powell was recruited by Glenn Miller for the Army Air Force Band. There he composed his first serious works--string trios and brass quintets that the Miller musicians tried out for him.

But when the war ended, he found himself once again on an odyssey, one that had begun in childhood with a prodigious mastery of classical music. Always evident was the intellect that led him at 15 to City College of New York and a major in math and French literature (he dropped out after a year to join Goodman).

He returned briefly to the Goodman band, then took jobs as a pianist at ABC and the Met playing for auditions (“Boy, did I know ‘Vissi d’Arte’ after three weeks!”).

Then, in 1946, he got a call from “this kid in California, Andre Previn,” inviting him to work for MGM at the fabulous rate of $500 a week. By that time he had married actress Martha Scott (William Wyler’s “Desperate Hours,” and, more recently, Herb Ross’ “The Turning Point”) and they decided Hollywood might be good for both of them.

“Here I was composing all this stuff for the studio. Checks came in every week but hardly any calls, except to accompany Mario Lanza and coach Katherine Grayson. I palled around with Andre and Oscar Levant--what wonderful comedians!--and enjoyed the camaraderie of James Mason and William Saroyan who also lived in our building at Hollywood and Vine. But I grew weary of it all and was dissatisfied with my technical skills as a composer.

“The remedy: to study with Paul Hindemith at Yale, which brought me full circle to serious music. My career took an A-B-A form. However, the B part (jazz) was very brief, lasting just a couple of years.”

For all intents and purposes the man who would become, with Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter, “the difficult trio,” left the jazz/pop/commercial world in 1947 for the halls of academe.

“The success, money and fame I got from the old days have gone a long way towards comforting me,” he says, referring to the esoteric world of new music, where, with others, he now thrives in a tiny ghetto far from public consciousness.

“I walked away (from the Goodman band) satisfied, ready to spend the rest of my life unnoticed, composing music that will be heard by a handful of people. But what a treat it is to still find myself salivating like a child when I look at a page of (Richard Strauss’) ‘Don Quixote.’ ”

At Yale, Powell not only flowered under Hindemith’s tutelage but eventually succeeded the German composer-pedagogue as chairman of the composition department. And he played the role like a consummate actor.

“My speech was a mix of distant German and soft British,” he laughs. “It was pure affectation.” He says he jumped gleefully into the intellectual atmosphere and, in a nod to the Zeitgeist, translated music theory into the voguish language of “scientism.”

“After all, Yale was a brand-name institution and I had to make sure the kids would not ask for their money back. So we spoke of such things as isochronous units or striated time and I taught under such rubrics as ‘foundations of sonic structures.’ Don’t get me wrong. I’m only talking about a couple of C-sharps. And chords, well, would you believe we called them verticalities ?”

Eventually, though, he saw himself as an outsider at Yale.

“Besides being the campus radical,” he says, “I also represented a discipline no one else was interested in. While I became conversant in their fields--theoretical physics, deconstructionist philosophy, etc.--and loved those Monday evenings of talk and brandy and cigars, the most they knew about music was the Beatles.”

Consequently, the call in 1969 to start up a music school for the newly founded CalArts fell on grateful ears. Powell and his family said goodby to New Haven and trekked to Los Angeles, a move that astonished his Ivy League colleagues. They saw him, naturally, as the grand Renaissance man moving to a cultural wasteland.

The Bronx apartment building on 161st Street where he lived with his brother, sister and immigrant parents was across the road from Yankee Stadium--a coincidence not to be lost on one of the few erudite composers to have played serious first base. The Garcia Grande cigars people paid him and his teammates $1 a game to compete in a sandlot park across from the stadium. A rank rookie then, with hitting talent, he got special coaching from Yankee catcher Bill Dickey, “this tall Southerner with the soft accent who called me--a little blond kid--’Whitey.’ ” When Dickey witnessed his protege’s 275-foot drive he said: “If you keep that up, Whitey, you’ll get to Newark (where the Yankees’ farm team played).”

“At 9 years, I had three heroes,” Powell says, breaking into a broad grin and palpably recalling his enthusiasm. “They were Babe Ruth, Debussy and Franklin D. Roosevelt--all of them positively equal in my mind. I was their passionate fan.”

An injury to his third finger, however, brought about the decision to choose piano study over baseball.

But music had a head start, thanks to his maternal grandfather--”a terribly stern Talmudic scholar with a Spinoza bent”--who lived with the family and, recognizing the 4-year-old grandson’s talent, bartered Hebrew for piano lessons with one Sara Barg.

“You could say I began to compose under her influence,” Powell muses. ‘She focused on music theory. Jazz was unknown to me then. But my brother Lloyd was an aficionado and had me listen to live radio broadcasts.”

Joining Goodman and changing his name, Powell remembers that “even Epstein was a fraud. My father’s father chose it as a concession to the customs agent at Ellis Island who otherwise would have had to stumble over Poljanowsky. Powell gives back some heritage points.”

Change of name, change of venue--Powell seems to collect them. But what attracted him to CalArts, where he has performed the duties of provost, dean, composer-in-residence and professor, was the idea of “becoming central rather than occupying the fringe--although I certainly don’t want to gainsay Yale and its achievements. But to find music, dance and theater as the primary focus was irresistibly exotic.”

In a verbal wink he also explains the transcontinental shift as a “desire to meet Gloria Swanson and Jane Fonda . . . and to leave behind in the slush and snow all thoughts of Adrian’s perception theory and the depolarization of the axon. Instead I wanted to pursue studies in health food and real estate, to find out if a composer accused of intellectual tendencies could win a game or two from a tennis pro, or at least become suntanned.”

His CalArts indoctrination included a little fiasco called “Contempo ’70.” At UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Zubin Mehta, was to conduct Powell’s “Immobiles” on the same program with Frank Zappa narrating his “200 Motels.” Outraged by Zappa’s “blathering on about masturbation--my 14-year-old-daughter was in the audience”--an offended Powell walked out, much to Ernest Fleischmann’s chagrin.

“Only later did the Machiavellian truth of this elaborate plan dawn on me. As CalArt’s music man I was to be the bridge between Disney money and the Philharmonic. It didn’t work then, but $50 million later the orchestra will have a new hall, thanks to Disney. And I even got a commission this year from Ernest--a double piano concerto to be premiered in January.”

But messy politics lie outside his concerns. “I joined a guild peopled by Bach and Mozart,” he says. “How dare I sit and whine while belonging to that domain? You do the noblest you can do and then hope to be embraced for it.”

Embraced he is, with such accolades as the Schoenberg and the Brandeis Award which constitute “my Andy Warhol 15 minutes in the spotlight,” quips Powell. However, his colleague England says that the tributes are entirely deserved: “Mel’s extraordinary intellect knows few boundaries. And especially now, he is composing at an unprecedented rate.”

But does Mel Powell pay dearly for pursuing an art that doesn’t land him Grammys and other symbols of mass validation?

“I’m a composer,” he says. “And that’s a vain assessment on its own. All the rest is subsidiary. So I can have no ill feeling against those who care little for what I do or even disapprove of it. What consoles me is that posterity may prove the greatness of my work. If worthy, it will be there when I’m gone. That’s the reward.”