Mel Tormé

Mel Tormé pursued a jazz-inflected pop singing career with unwavering dedication across the 1940s through the 1990s, concentrating his efforts mainly in nightclubs and concert halls. Within his 1988 memoir It Wasn't All Velvet, a title drawn from the nickname “The Velvet Fog” that a disc jockey had given him during the 1940s to capture the husky breadth of his voice, he expressed regret at not having entered the world ten years sooner, in 1915 instead of 1925. Had that timeline held, Tormé would have shared the same generational moment as Frank Sinatra and, like him, might have built a sustained big-band vocal career. Given the scope of his abilities, he could equally have led an orchestra, for beyond singing he played drums at a level that attracted road offers while still a teenager, composed one of the enduring Christmas standards, and created arrangements for much of his own repertoire. Even this inventory falls short of his full range, which extended to appearances in more than a dozen feature films plus radio and television work, hosting duties on both media, authorship of television dramas, articles for Down Beat and The New York Times, and six published volumes of fiction, biography, and music criticism.

All the same, Tormé is chiefly remembered for his singing, a pursuit marked by substantial artistic accomplishment alongside persistent commercial setbacks, above all on record. The 1925 birth year, despite his early promise, placed him, like Tony Bennett and similar peers, in a generation that absorbed swing and jazz only to discover those styles sidelined commercially just as adulthood arrived; as a performer he therefore confronted the dilemma of addressing a smaller audience with music he favored or adjusting his approach for broader appeal, a pressure that sharpened once the rock era began in the mid-1950s. Like Bennett and a handful of others, he navigated this largely through sustained determination, yielding only when necessary while enduring lean stretches until the 1980s brought both a supportive label and fresh public interest in the music he preferred. In contrast to Bennett, he maintained this path with scant commercial success as a record seller, yet compensated by attracting stronger jazz-audience loyalty that responded to his evident love for the idiom and his scat-singing prowess, surpassed only by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Recalling a difficult period in his autobiography, he noted that he came to feel he possessed not a career but merely a succession of jobs; if that were so, his singing together with the breadth of his other talents ensured he was never without employment.

Tormé descended from Russian Jews who had settled in Chicago. At the time of his birth his father ran a dry-goods store, yet both parents were musically inclined—his father sang and his mother played piano. Tormé himself displayed musical ability at an exceptionally early age. His mother recalled that he delivered his first complete song at ten months. By four he sang along with radio broadcasts, displaying particular fascination with the Coon-Sanders Orchestra during their remote broadcasts from Chicago’s Blackhawk Hotel, prompting his parents to bring him to hear the band one Monday evening. That encounter marked the start of his professional path. Bandleaders Joe Sanders and Carlton Coon noticed the youngster and featured him as a novelty act for nearly six months, after which he worked with additional ensembles.

As a child Tormé appeared with local vaudeville companies and also took up drumming. In 1934 he won a Chicago World’s Fair contest for promising young radio performers, which led to a string of roles on Chicago-originating radio dramas that continued until his voice changed in his early teens. During the same period he kept singing and began composing original material. While a student at Hyde Park High School he performed in student bands. In 1940, at fifteen, he auditioned a song he had written, “Lament to Love,” for bandleader Harry James, also playing drums during the audition. James first offered him a place in the band but later reconsidered on account of his age. Nevertheless, James recorded “Lament to Love” for Columbia Records, where it reached number ten for one week in August 1941. The song’s success brought Tormé into contact with Ben Pollack, who in 1942 was assembling an orchestra to be fronted by comedian Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers during a time when many musicians were entering military service for World War II. Tormé’s youth now proved advantageous: at sixteen he could leave high school yet remained too young for the draft, so in August 1942 he joined the group, leading its vocal ensemble and later filling in on drums. He later earned his diploma from Los Angeles High School in 1944, served briefly in the army, and received a medical discharge because of flat feet. Two airchecks by this band, made December 20, 1942, represent Tormé’s earliest recordings; on them he sings the Irving Berlin number “Abraham” from the then-current film Holiday Inn and performs a drum solo on “Pagliacci (Vesti la Giubba).”

While performing with Chico Marx in New York, Tormé was scouted for RKO Pictures; when the band disbanded in July 1943 he was cast in the musical Higher and Higher, which began filming in August. Although based on a Rodgers & Hart stage work, the picture substituted songs by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson and is chiefly recalled today as Frank Sinatra’s first substantial screen appearance. The seventeen-year-old Tormé’s part was considerably smaller, yet he sang on four numbers when the film opened in December. Meanwhile, following Pollack’s suggestion, he had begun collaborating with a vocal group from Los Angeles City College known as the Schoolkids. He became their featured singer and arranger, and the ensemble was renamed Mel Tormé & His Mel-Tones. He also secured his sole leading film role in the Universal B-picture Pardon My Rhythm, released in May 1944, which included his compositions “Munchies” (co-written with Irving Bibo) and “Drummer Boy.”

Mel Tormé & His Mel-Tones made their recording debut with the 1944 Jewel single “White Christmas” / “Where or When.” They also began radio work, notably on the comedy series Niles and Prindle that ran from January to June 1945, and appeared in the Columbia film Let’s Go Steady in March 1945, performing several of Tormé’s own songs. (He continued separate work as well, appearing in the B-picture Junior Miss in June.) Signed to Decca Records, the group supplied background vocals on two singles: Eugenie Baird’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” which charted in October, and Bing Crosby’s “Day by Day,” which entered the charts in March 1946. The ensemble then moved to the new Musicraft label, where their featured vocals on the Irving Berlin song “I Got the Sun in the Morning” from the musical Annie Get Your Gun, recorded with Artie Shaw & His Orchestra, produced a chart entry in July. During the same stretch Tormé continued making brief or cameo film appearances, turning up in Warner Bros.’ Janie Gets Married in June and the Cole Porter bio-pic Night and Day in July.

Tormé & the Mel-Tones issued further Musicraft sides, including “It’s Dreamtime,” their sole chart entry in May 1947, yet by November 1946 Tormé had agreed to manager Carlos Gastel’s strategy of launching a solo career. (He still undertook occasional work with the Mel-Tones for years afterward.) Gastel also managed Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. It was Cole’s King Cole Trio that first recorded “The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You),” which Tormé had written with lyricist Robert Wells. Sometimes known by its opening line, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” the song reached number three for the trio in late December 1946, the start of its lasting popularity; half a century later Tormé estimated that 1,700 recordings of it had been made.

The twenty-one-year-old Tormé formally began his solo career with an early 1947 nightclub engagement at the Bocage in Los Angeles, initiating nearly five decades of steady live work. Gastel secured an MGM film contract, and in February Tormé began shooting a supporting role in Good News, drawn from the 1930 Henderson-DeSylva-Brown stage musical. He left before completion to make his New York club debut at the Copacabana in May, then remained on the East Coast for a fifteen-minute NBC radio series, The Mel Tormé Show. Later in 1947, back in Los Angeles, he wrote the title song for the RKO picture Magic Town, released in August.

Good News opened in December 1947, after which Tormé received a role in the Rodgers & Hart bio-pic Words and Music, singing “Blue Moon.” During summer 1948 NBC revived The Mel Tormé Show as a half-hour situation comedy with music originating from Los Angeles. Tormé also received another film songwriting assignment when he and Wells composed “The County Fair” for the Walt Disney animated feature So Dear to My Heart, released, like Words and Music, in December 1948. Gastel arranged Tormé’s signing to Capitol Records, home to clients Cole and Lee; Tormé’s second Capitol session in January 1949 yielded “Careless Hands,” which reached number one in April. He followed with the double-sided hit “Again,” which peaked at number three, and “Blue Moon,” which reached number twenty. “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” recorded in May, climbed to number ten in July; the duet “The Old Master Painter” with Peggy Lee reached number nine in January 1950; and the Rodgers & Hart song “Bewitched” (also known as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”) hit number eight in July 1950. Yet while Tormé’s recordings enjoyed peak commercial success, his film career declined. Cast in MGM’s The Duchess of Idaho with Esther Williams, he discovered upon its June 1950 release that his part had been reduced to a few lines of dialogue and that his sole song had been excised.

Alongside his hit singles, Tormé created an ambitious extended work as his response to Gordon Jenkins’s tone poem Manhattan Tower Suite. California Suite, featuring the Mel-Tones and an orchestra led by Jud Conlon (with Peggy Lee appearing under a pseudonym), was recorded in November 1949 and issued as Tormé’s—and Capitol’s—first LP in 1950.

Tormé achieved his final chart single for a decade with “Anywhere I Wander” in November 1952. It came from his last Capitol session; afterward he lacked label affiliation for a year before signing with Coral, a Decca subsidiary. Multiple singles sessions followed, and on December 15, 1954, Coral captured a live performance at Los Angeles’s Crescendo Club that became the 1955 LP Gene Norman Presents Mel Tormé “Live” at the Crescendo, the first of many live albums. Tormé then moved to the small jazz label Bethlehem Records, beginning with the ballad collection It’s a Blue World, recorded in August 1955. This was followed by the first of many collaborations with pianist-arranger Marty Paich, Mel Tormé and the Marty Paich Dek-Tette, recorded in January 1956, and by a studio-cast Porgy and Bess in which Tormé sang Porgy opposite Frances Faye’s Bess, recorded in May.

Tormé had already begun expanding his touring reach overseas, appearing in Australia in fall 1955; in spring 1956 the Rodgers & Hart song “Mountain Greenery,” taken from the Coral live album, was issued as a U.K. single and reached the Top Ten in July, coinciding with his first European visit. Back in Los Angeles that November he recorded the LP Mel Tormé Sings Fred Astaire with Marty Paich, and on February 22, 1957, he returned to the Crescendo for another live set, issued under the similar title Gene Norman Presents Mel Tormé at the Crescendo. The following month Bethlehem added further confusion by having Tormé re-record California Suite. Financial difficulties soon ended the label’s existence after one additional Tormé release, Songs for Any Taste (assembled from remaining Crescendo tracks). During a 1957 U.K. summer visit he recorded the Philips album Tormé Meets the British for British audiences; in the U.S. that November he signed with the small Tops label for Prelude to a Kiss, an album later reissued repeatedly under varying titles.

On February 14, 1957, Tormé took a non-singing acting role in the live television drama The Comedian on the prestigious Playhouse 90 series. The appearance revived his film career, leading to a series of straight-acting parts in generally low-budget pictures: The Fearmakers (1958), The Big Operator (1959), Girls Town (1959), Walk Like a Dragon (1960)—for which he wrote the title song—and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1961). His recording activity increased in 1958 when impresario Norman Granz signed him to the jazz-oriented Verve Records, the same label that featured peers such as Ella Fitzgerald. The association produced eight albums over the next four years: Tormé; Olé Tormé: Mel Tormé Goes South of the Border with Billy May; Back in Town (with the Mel-Tones); Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley; Swingin’ on the Moon; Broadway, Right Now! (with Margaret Whiting); I Dig the Duke! I Dig the Count!; and My Kind of Music. The releases received strong jazz-community approval without achieving major sales. By the early 1960s Verve had become a subsidiary of a larger company and was no longer an independent jazz label; Tormé accepted an offer from what he believed would be the more sympathetic Ertegun brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi, at Atlantic Records.

Atlantic, however, sought more pop-oriented material. Tormé’s first Atlantic project, the live album Mel Tormé at the Red Hill recorded in March 1962, reflected his own preferences, yet the label obtained the bluesy single “Comin’ Home Baby,” cut in September 1962, which became a Top 40 hit on both sides of the Atlantic and earned Tormé his first two Grammy nominations (Best Solo Performance, Male, and Best Rhythm & Blues Recording), although he disliked the track. Atlantic quickly released the Comin’ Home Baby! LP, but it failed to chart.

In spring 1963 Tormé agreed to serve as musical advisor for the forthcoming television series The Judy Garland Show. He supplied arrangements and special material for the variety program, which aired twenty-six hour-long episodes from Sunday, September 29, 1963, until its cancellation on March 29, 1964. (He later described his experiences in his first book, The Other Side of the Rainbow, published in 1970.) He took time from the series in November 1963 to record the title song for the film Sunday in New York, which accompanied the credits when the picture opened the following month. Also in December he recorded the companion Atlantic LP Mel Tormé Sings Sunday in New York & Other Songs About New York, concluding his tenure with the label.

After finishing The Judy Garland Show in winter 1964, Tormé returned to live performing as his central activity. He signed with Columbia Records, for which he cut several singles that year, and found time to play himself in the summer release The Patsy. He recorded his first Columbia LP, That’s All, in sessions held in December 1964 and March 1965. He found his Columbia stay even less satisfying than Atlantic, particularly once the label began urging him to record contemporary pop and rock material. His 1966 sessions for the LP Right Now! incorporated recent hits such as “Homeward Bound,” “Red Rubber Ball,” and “Secret Agent Man,” none of which suited him. “Lover’s Roulette” reached the Top Ten on the Easy Listening chart in summer 1967, yet it came from his penultimate Columbia session; by year’s end he had left the label.

Tormé had appeared in another film, A Man Called Adam, in summer 1966, again portraying himself, and contributed the song “All That Jazz” (distinct from the number of the same title in the 1975 musical Chicago) to the soundtrack LP issued on Reprise Records. He next began generating television roles, writing and guest-starring in an episode of Run for Your Life, then adapting his pseudonymous 1950s Western novel Dollarhide into an episode of The Virginian in which he also appeared. By this point he had largely abandoned recordings as vehicles for music he valued, accepting contracts mainly to promote live work. Moving to Liberty Records in early 1968, he recorded the LP A Day in the Life of Bonnie and Clyde, for which he composed the title song while the remaining selections dated from the 1920s and 1930s. In 1969 he unexpectedly found himself back at Capitol yet dutifully produced what he later called two “wonderfully forgettable” albums, A Time for Us and Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head. After these releases he remained absent from record stores for several years while continuing regular live performances.

In May 1971 Tormé hosted the ABC documentary series It Was a Very Good Year, each installment devoted to a year between 1919 and 1964; the series concluded at the end of August. He returned to television acting with the starring role in the 1974 TV movie Snowman and continued occasional acting and singing appearances on television for the remainder of his career. In September 1974, while performing at New York’s St. Regis Hotel Maisonette Room with Al Porcino & His Orchestra, he recorded a live album acquired by Atlantic and released as Live at the Maisonette in 1975. He stated he never received royalties from the LP, yet it earned him a third Grammy nomination, this time for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) for his “Gershwin Medley.” In 1976 he finally signed with Gryphon Records, recording the LP Tormé! A New Album in London in June 1977. It was preceded by the January 1978 sessions for Together Again: For the First Time, on which he shared billing with longtime friend drummer and bandleader Buddy Rich. The Rich collaboration brought Tormé his fourth Grammy nomination, in the Best Jazz Vocal Performance category in 1978 (the category having been introduced only two years earlier), while Tormé! A New Album earned his fifth nomination in the same category in 1979. A sixth nomination, again for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, followed for the 1981 Finesse LP Mel Tormé and Friends Recorded Live at Marty’s New York City, which reached number 44 on the Billboard jazz chart. Encore at Marty’s appeared in 1982 on Flair Records.

By the early 1980s, as traditional pop began regaining popularity, Tormé had outlasted an extended period of limited visibility and was gaining recognition as a jazz singer, appearing regularly at jazz festivals, major concert halls, and with symphony orchestras, together with annual engagements at leading clubs worldwide. In April 1982 he performed with pianist George Shearing at San Francisco’s Hotel Mark Hopkins Peacock Court; the concert was recorded for the album An Evening with George Shearing & Mel Tormé, issued by the jazz-focused West Coast label Concord Records. Reaching number 34 on the jazz chart, it initiated productive associations