Do you know the way to Mel Torme?

Today is the anniversary of the birth of jazz singer Mel Torme in 1925. Torme died at age 73 in 1999 in Los Angeles at the end of an incredibly fruitful career. The wonderful Allmusic Guide take on Torme by William Ruhlmann testifies to the variety of his gifts:

[G]iven the breadth of his talents, he might have been a bandleader since, in addition to singing, he was also a drummer good enough to have gotten offers to go on the road as early as his teens, a songwriter responsible for one of the perennial Christmas standards, and an arranger who wrote the charts for much of the music he performed. Amazingly, this is still only a partial list of his accomplishments, which also included acting in more than a dozen feature films and on radio and television; hosting radio and TV shows; and writing television dramas, numerous articles for periodicals including Down Beat and The New York Times, and six published books of fiction, biography, and music criticism.

By the age of four, Torme was singing professionally with the Coon-Sanders Band at Chicago’s Blackhawk Hotel. In his memoir It Wasn’t All Velvet, Torme situates the commencement of his career at the end of the Roaring Twenties:

Flagpole sitters were still doing their dizzying thing, daredevils walked tightropes between buildings twenty-five stories high, and ex-World War I aviators were flying surplus Jennies under the Brooklyn Bridge. Novelty was the key to success and a kid in short pants and a beret belting out pop tunes with a famous band fit right in with the nutty goings-on that attended the collapse of Wall Street and the subsequent Great Depression.

As a singer, Torme’s musicality was based on consummate taste, perfect time, and great harmonic gifts. Early in his singing career he teamed with Peggy Lee’s future husband Dave Barbour, who was a member of the quartet that occasionally backed Torme in the 1940’s, and Torme’s strengths as a vocalist seem to me to share much in common with Lee’s. His range, control, and scatting ability, however, put him somewhere in the vicinity of Ella Fitzgerald’s neighborhood at the apex of the craft; Fitzgerald was certainly his favorite singer. He was not only an incomparable stylist, he got better as he got older.

You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Torme tear through popular music’s gift to the geometry student, “Pythagoras, How You Stagger Us,” a song that dates from the early period of Torme’s singing career documented on Proper Records’ four-disc collection “Jazz and Velvet.” Torme continued to perfect his craft as a jazz singer. In 1956, for example, he recorded two brilliant albums with the Marty Paich Dek-tette that are now collected on the aptly titled “The 1956 Torme-Paich Legendary Sessions.” In the video above, Torme is reunited with Paich at the 1988 Fujitsu Concord Jazz Festival in Japan for a magnificent rendition of the Ted Koehler/Harold Arlen composition “When the Sun Comes Out.” (Listen to the gloss Torme puts on “on my windowpane” at 2:38.)

I think it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Torme never really found a sympathetic producer or record company until 1982, when he began a collaboration with Concord Records that resulted in something like the music of the spheres. His work with George Shearing on Concord is full of beauty and hijinks. In the liner notes to the two-disc collection of Torme’s highlights on Concord, Shearing writes that in the Ellington medley he’s playing “I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart” while Torme is singing “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Shearing comments: “We had to stay sober while recording this one!”

Torme ended his career on the many high notes reflected in the Concord recordings. The several live recordings from this era (not all on Concord) are especially noteworthy. “Mel Torme and Friends Live at Marty’s,” for example, is apparently now available only by download on Amazon, but it shows Torme working at the height of his powers.

Toward the end of his memoir, Torme writes: “Timing is everything, particularly in the music business.” Torme’s career came to an end with the stroke he suffered in August 1996. His last recording was “An Evening with Mel Torme,” recorded live the month before his stroke. His final recorded song turned out to be Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” Timing is indeed everything, but Torme’s career is also a reminder of the fact that even genius occasionally requires sheer persistence combined with raw talent to produce the full flowering of great gifts.

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