Lost in the Fog: Mel Tormé
Mel Tormé could swing with the best of them. Ask Frank Sinatra. “If I’m the Chairman of the Board,” Sinatra once wrote, “then Mel Tormé owns the company.”
There’s a diverting clip on YouTube from Judy Garland’s T.V. show, sometime in the early 1960s. A somewhat abstracted-looking Garland introduces “one of my most talented friends”, to reveal Mel Tormé in a snappy tux and frilly dress shirt, shimmying across a set liberally sprinkled with Honda motorbikes, some of which are adorned with imperious-looking models decked out in extravagant white ensembles of the ‘If-Liz- Taylor-as-Cleopatra-shopped-at-Biba-for-her-big-day’ variety.
The song is Comin’ Home Baby, a loungecore classic familiar to modern listeners from its use in everything from The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (a T.V. outpost of the Marvel universe) to Nissan ads. Tormé might resemble a sallow Borscht Belt crooner assuring his baby that, wild oats presumably sown, he’ll be manifesting on the doorstep any minute, but the way he slides his pledges into the song’s offbeats betrays his longstanding jazz chops. By the time he mounts his own Honda, at the clip’s end, and chugs off set, you’re left with two contrasting impressions: one, he’s patently no Marlon Brando in The Wild One; and two, man, that cat can swing.
By the time that clip aired, Tormé had already been a star for the best part of three decades, gliding seamlessly between supper- club pop and urbane jazz; indeed, his facility for both modes earned him favourable comparisons with Ella Fitzgerald. He was a talented arranger, played both drums and piano, and wrote around 300 songs, many with Robert Wells, including 1946’s imperishable The Christmas Song (the one that starts: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire... ”). He collaborated with a veritable Who’s Who of American greats, from Buddy Rich and Artie Shaw to Peggy Lee and Barry Manilow. But if critics maintained that he was an underrated stylist, it might have had something to do with his silky, flawlessly fluid, non-horse-frightening baritone, stolid if always stylish appearance, and a nickname — the ‘Velvet Fog’ — that seemed to imply both soft, downy smoothness and wet blanket status. To his credit, Tormé always refuted the term, coined by the New York D.J. Fred Robbins — “I never used it, but other people did” — though he had to concede that he got off lightly, considering Robbins’ proposed alternatives: Mr. Butterscotch, or the Kid with Gauze in His Jaws.
You’re left with contrasting impressions: one, he’s no Brando in The Wild One; and two, that cat can swing.
Tormé’s casual, breezy style and ability to float words into a song’s interstices, aided by perfect pitch and a drummer’s inherent feel for rhythm, made him a musician’s musician. Ethel Waters once extolled him as “the only white man who sings with the soul of a black man”, while the critic Will Friedwald hailed Tormé as a pioneer of “cool jazz... as an improviser he shames all but two or three other scat singers, and quite a few horn players as well”. Bing Crosby described Tormé as “the greatest singing entertainer I’ve ever seen” — “I couldn’t believe he said that,” marvelled the genuinely unassuming Tormé; “I lost sleep over it” — while Frank Sinatra, in a liner note on one of Tormé’s albums, opined that, “If I’m the Chairman of the Board, then Mel Tormé owns the company”.
Tormé’s climb to swingin’ stakeholder started early. He was born on the south side of Chicago in 1925 to a working-class Jewish family. His father, a Russian immigrant — an agent had changed the family name from Torma to Tormé on their arrival in the U.S. — ran a dry goods store. As a boy, he recalled in an interview with TV Guide, his family would sit on the front stoop after Sabbath dinner and sing for the neighbours. His mother, who worked in a sheet music store, urged him onto the stage at the age of four for $15 a session. “It happened totally by accident at the Black Hawk restaurant in Chicago, where my parents took me for dinner,” he recalled in an interview with the Jazz Professional website. “There was a famous band of its day there, the Coon-Sanders Orchestra. I was in a sailor suit, and one of ’em commented, ‘What a cute little boy’. My mother said, ‘Yes, and he knows all your songs — he sings right along with the radio’. They took me up, I sang You’re Driving Me Crazy, and apparently it was a silly little sensation in those crazy days, back in the late twenties. So I became a regular feature in there.”
Tormé cemented his prodigal status by winning a children’s talent contest at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and appearing in vaudeville revues and radio serials – “I must have done hundreds, maybe even thousands, from when I was eight till I was about 15,” he recalled — while touring as a singer, arranger and drummer in a band led by Chico Marx, of Brothers fame, attempting to hold down the beat while Marx did some proto-Little Richard showboating at the piano. It was during the band’s Los Angeles residency that Tormé was ‘discovered’ by Hollywood, and cast in forties bobby- soxploitation movie musicals like Higher and Higher (where Sinatra also made his film debut) and Good News. Meanwhile, he’d begun writing songs at 13 — he was still a high-school student when Harry James scored a hit with his very teenage-sounding Lament To Love — and was only 21 when he appeared as a soloist at the Copacabana in New York, having had a huge hit of his own with Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love? Tormé’s song portfolio — including such stalwarts as Born to Be Blue and County Fair — took its lead from Porter’s oeuvre in foregrounding lyrical sophistication. “The lyric, to me, is 95 per cent of what a song is,” he once said. “The singer is presenting a playlet to the audience, involving them in what he’s saying. If the melody is attractive, that’s the frosting on the cake. The lyric is the cake.”
Or a Yule log, in the instance of Tormé’s most famous offering. The Christmas Song was born when Tormé dropped in on Robert Wells on a swelteringly hot July day. Indicating a notebook on the piano with some scribbled notations, Wells told Tormé that he was trying to cool off by immersing himself in images of winter, but it wasn’t really working. “So I grabbed the book, and I saw, ‘Chestnuts roasting... Jack Frost nipping... Yuletide carols... Folks dressed up like Eskimos,” Tormé recalled. “Forty minutes later, that song was written. I wrote all the music and some of the lyrics. I’ve racked my brain to remember which lyrics I wrote. It doesn’t matter.” The song has since been recorded more than 1,700 times, but Nat King Cole’s original remained Tormé’s favourite.
The lyric, to me, is 95 per cent of what a song is. The singer is presenting a playlet to the audience.
Tormé always wore his bebop heart on his sleeve: he’d recorded albums with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald’s arranger Marty Paich as far back as the mid fifties. “I wanted to embed in the minds of the public at large that this syrupy, creamy bobby-sox sensation was taking the musical bull by the horns and singing the kind of music he wanted to sing,” he later recalled. But his relative lack of commercial success meant that he reluctantly attempted to ride the rock boom of the early sixties when, in his own estimation, “I recorded some of the worst dreck you can imagine” (the driving jive of Comin’ Home Baby, a top 40 hit, being a notable exception). He considered retraining as an airline pilot,
took a gig as arranger on that same Judy Garland show where he’d once frugged amid the 150ccs (his subsequent book on his experiences, The Other Side of the Rainbow, was so near-the-knuckle on Garland’s drug-haze decline that her family brought an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against him), and married four times. The third union, with the British actress Janette Scott, was hailed as “Hollywood’s happiest”, with the inevitable corollary — an acrimonious divorce and a high court battle over the custody of their three children...
Photo Credits: Getty Images
