‘Mel Tormé at 100: A Celebration with Billy Stritch and Nicolas King’
54 Below
September 12 and September 14, 7 p.m.

Mel Tormé was unquestionably one of the great jazz singers of all time, by any definition, and yet he himself was never entirely comfortable with that label. Well, let me clarify that: He didn’t mind if someone else called him that, but he hesitated to claim it for himself.  

I knew Tormé for about 15-20 years, between the early 1980s and his death in 1999, and he felt that it was problematic to describe a singer as a jazz artist in the same way that the great musicians are characterized. At the same time, though, he thought that it was a matter of degrees of influence, that some singers were inherently jazzier than others. Tormé was never one to be unnecessarily modest — believe me, he knew how great he was — so there was a kind of inherent contradiction about him.

Yet if anybody was a jazz singer, and a brilliant one, it was Mel Tormé. He sang with a virtually unstoppable swinging energy, and had better time than almost anyone. He had a flawless voice and near perfect intonation, and more than virtually every other vocalist of his generation, was highly trained musically. 

Tormé didn’t make it beyond high school, but he formally studied harmony and music theory, and was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist — there are recordings of him playing professional-level piano, guitar and ukulele, and especially drums. Like his colleague Peggy Lee, he was also a very successful songwriter, and had the ability to arrange his own orchestrations.

He loved to tell the story of how he first started performing on drums and vocals as a toddler at Chicago, and how he helped put bread on his Jewish American immigrant family’s table during the depths of the Depression. He was a prodigy as a singer, drummer, and composer.  

As a youngster in the 1940s, he sang, played percussion, and organized vocal groups — famously the Mel Tones — for bandleaders like Artie Shaw, who once told me Mel was probably the best male singer he ever worked with. 

In the 1950s, Mel teamed with the dynamic composer-orchestrator Marty Paich — whose centennial is also being celebrated in 2025 — to create a series of innovative albums that quite literally re-imagined the role of the human voice in the context of modern jazz, specifically the West Coast-associated “cool jazz” sound of the era.  

The albums “Mel Tormé and the Marty Paich Dek-Tette” (1956), also known as “Lulu’s Back In Town,” and “Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley” (1960) are hard-swinging masterpieces of jazz interpretation.  Yet Tormé also could sing a love song or a sad song in a way that would absolutely break your heart, as on such all-ballad albums as “It’s a Blue World” (1955) and “That’s All” (1965). As a crooner, he was dubbed early on “The Velvet Fog” by a New York disc jockey, a “brand” – as we would say in the 21st century – that he both loved and hated.

Tormé had the respect of virtually every singer of his generation: Vic Damone, Jack Jones, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee, Kay Starr, Betty Carter, Billy Eckstine, Steve Lawrence, and Eydie Gorme were all fans, and Tony Bennett spoke admirably of his knowledge of music, both the technical and the historical side — and they are just a few of the singers with whom I spoke personally. 

As a composer, Tormé’s most successful work was the holiday perennial “The Christmas Song,” but other of his songs, like “Born to be Blue,” were and are widely performed in the jazz world. He also wrote one major full-length work, “The California Suite,” and penned arrangements for other singers, famously his friend Judy Garland.

So far, the major celebration of his career is coming this weekend at 54 Below, starring two contemporary artists who were deeply influenced by Tormé. Billy Stritch, the pianist and singer, has worked with everyone from Liza Minnelli to Tony Bennett. He never had the chance to play for Tormé, but he did open for him at Carnegie Hall in 1988 as part of the vocal trio of Montgomery, Plant, & Stritch.  Nicolas King, like Tormé, is a compact dynamo and a ball of talent and good taste. At 33, he is too young even to have heard Tormé live. Still, Mr. King is probably Tormé’s greatest living acolyte, having practiced the singer’s canon by working for years with Tormé’s longtime musical partner, the late Mike Renzi, a brilliant pianist.

Tormé was a unique character; he hated being compared to Frank Sinatra even though he referred to him publicly and privately as “The Champ, FS.” Evidently he thought that there was no way he, or anyone, could come out ahead in that equation.  

Conversely, Mel loved being mentioned in the same sentence as Ella Fitzgerald, even though that was also a difficult comparison. He told me more than once, “I don’t care if you want to call me the male Ella Fitzgerald — or even the Jewish Ella Fitzgerald.” 

This week’s episode of my radio show, “Sing! Sing! Sing!” (on KSDS Jazz 88.3 San Diego), is a special celebration of Mel Tormé, and features him singing the songs of his friend and musical inspiration, Johnny Mercer. You can listen to it here.