Later Years
In 1987 Mel Powell joined other music greats for a jazz festival on the cruise ship SS Norway playing alongside Benny Carter, Howard Alden, Milt Hinton, and Louie Bellson and others. One performance has been documented on the CD release The Return of Mel Powell (Chiaroscuro Records). This CD includes twenty minutes of Powell discussing his life and his reasons for leaving jazz. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine jazz critic Whitney Balliett Powell stated "I have decided that when I retire I will think through my decision to leave jazz -- with the help of Freud and Jung. At the moment, I suspect it was this: I had done what I felt I had to do in jazz. I had decided it did not hold the deepest interest for me musically. And I had decided that it was a young man's music, even a black music. Also, the endless repetition of material in the Goodman band -- playing the same tunes day after day and night after night -- got to me. That repetition tended to kill spontaneity, which is the heart of jazz and which can give a lifetime's nourishment."
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