Mel Powell was an American pianist, composer, and music educator whose career moved between jazz performance and academic life across more than four decades.

Born in the Bronx on February 12, 1923, Powell attended DeWitt Clinton High School before pursuing formal studies at Yale University. Those two educational poles — the street-level world of jazz and the rigors of academic music training — shaped the dual character of his professional life. He worked as a jazz musician, performing and recording within that genre, while simultaneously developing a sustained engagement with composition and musicology.

Powell's commitment to music education extended over forty years and across several institutions, including Mannes College of Music, Queens College, and the California Institute of the Arts. At CalArts, he served as the founding dean of the music department, a role that placed him at the center of building a new institutional framework for music study in California. He died in Sherman Oaks on April 24, 1998, having spent much of his later life on the West Coast.

The honors Powell received reflect the range of his contributions. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Arts and Letters Award in Music, recognitions that acknowledged his work as both composer and educator. Most significantly, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Music, one of the field's highest distinctions. Taken together, these awards point to a career that moved with some fluency between the performed traditions of jazz and the compositional demands of a more formal musical practice — a sustained engagement with both that defined his work throughout his life.