Happy 100th birthday to the late, great Mel Torme’!!

Melvin Howard Tormé was an American musician, singer, composer, arranger, drummer, actor, and author. He was a jazz icon.  He won two Grammy Awards and was nominated a total of 14 times.

Mel grew up in a largely black neighborhood and was heavily influenced by jazz. He was a child prodigy, who performed professionally at age four with the Coon-Sanders Orchestra.  He would sing “You’re Driving Me Crazy” – a song he had learned on the radio, at Chicago’s  Blackhawk restaurant. He was invited back and sang every Monday night for six months.  It wasn’t a bad first gig. He was paid $15 a night with a free dinner for his family.

From 1942 to 1943, he was a member of a band led by Chico Marx. He was the singer and drummer and also created some arrangements for the band. In 1944, he formed a vocal quintet called Mel Tormé and His Mel-Tones. His group was modeled on Frank Sinatra and The Pied Pipers. The Mel-Tones had several hits while fronting Artie Shaw’s band and on their own. The Mel-Tones were among the first jazz-influenced vocal groups.

In 1947, he started a solo singing career. His appearances at New York’s Copacabana led local disc jockey Fred Robbins to give him the nickname “the Velvet Fog” in honor of his high tenor and smooth vocal style. Mel detested the nickname. He self-deprecatingly referred to it as “this Velvet Frog voice”.

As a solo singer, he recorded several romantic hits for Decca records and with the Artie Shaw Orchestra for Musiccraft (1946–1948). In 1949, he moved to Capital records, where his first record, “Careless Hands”, became his only number-one hit.

Though he spent most of his career singing jazz, Tormé had a deep appreciation of classical music. As for Rock and roll … he considered “three-chord manure”.

In the ’60s and ’70s, Tormé covered pop tunes of the day, never staying long with one label. He had two minor hits: his 1956 recording of “Mountain Greenery”, which did better in the United Kingdom where it reached No. 4; and his 1962 R&B song “Comin’ Home Baby”, which reached No. 13 in the UK. “Comin’ Home Baby” led the jazz and gospel singer Ethel Waters to say that “Tormé is the only white man who sings with the soul of a black man.”

He gained popularity among a younger generation when he made nine guest appearances as himself (and one as a guardian angel) on the 1980s situation comedy Night Court.  The main character, Judge Harry Stone, played by Harry Anderson, was depicted as an unabashed Tormé fan, an admiration that Anderson shared in real life. Anderson would deliver the eulogy at Tormé’s funeral.

Mel also appeared in Mountain Dew commercials and in a 1995 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld as himself. This is in one of my favorite episodes – “The Jimmy.”

During the 1980s and 1990s he performed often with piano great George Shearing. They recorded six albums together for Concord Records.  It was about this period Shearing wrote:

It is impossible to imagine a more compatible musical partner… I humbly put forth that Mel and I had the best musical marriage in many a year. We literally breathed together during our countless performances. As Mel put it, we were two bodies of one musical mind.

Mel Tormé wrote more than 250 songs, several of which became standards. He often wrote the arrangements for the songs he sang. He collaborated with Bob Wells on his most popular composition, “The Christmas Song”(1946). They wrote the song on a swelteringly hot and sunny day in California, sitting down and coming up with all the most ‘mid-wintery’ things they could think of, in an attempt to cool themselves down; it was recorded first by Nat King Cole.  Tormé said that he wrote the music in 45 minutes and that it was not one of his favorites, calling it “my annuity”

I had the chance to see him when he toured with Doc Severinsen.  He was fantastic!  He owned that stage and had the audience in the palm of his hand.  That concert remains one of the best concerts I have ever been to.  He blew me away when he joined Doc for Sing, Sing, Sing and played the drums.  It was amazing.

On August 8, 1996, a stroke ended Tormé’s 65-year singing career. In February 1999, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He died from another stroke on June 5, 1999, at the age of 73

In his eulogistic essay, John Andrews wrote:

Tormé’s style shared much with that of his idol, Ella Fitzgerald. Both were firmly rooted in the foundation of the swing era, but both seemed able to incorporate bebop innovations to keep their performances sounding fresh and contemporary. Like Sinatra, they sang with perfect diction and brought out the emotional content of the lyrics through subtle alterations of phrasing and harmony. Ballads were characterized by paraphrasing of the original melody which always seemed tasteful, appropriate and respectful to the vision of the songwriter. Unlike Sinatra, both Fitzgerald and Tormé were likely to cut loose during a swinging up-tempo number with several scat  choruses, using their voices without words to improvise a solo like a brass or reed instrument.

They were two of the best scat singers. Watch this magical improv moment with Ella and Mel:

Happy 100th birthday, Mel! 

Source: Wiki