Mel Torme, who died June 5 at 73, was one of the great American singers of the century; he may well have been the single most underappreciated, too. His 15 minutes as a bobby-soxer idol aside, he was never a bona fide star. His biggest hits and greatest fame were behind him by the time he was 30. He never captured the Zeitgeist like Frank Sinatra; nor did MTV enshrine him as a grand old hipster like Tony Bennett. He cut an almost comical figure: squat, rotund, a little rumpled. But if Torme looked like Zero Mostel, he was every inch a "cat": a virtually unrivaled vocal virtuoso who moved effortlessly from glorious pop balladeering to quicksilver scat improvisations, singing with breathtaking technical precision and still managing to wring genuine feeling from every note. Ethel Waters once said: "Mel Torme is the only white man who sings with the soul of a black man." Count Basie agreed: "The way Mel sings, he should have been black."

His career traced a classic mid-century show-biz trajectory, complete with vaguely vaudevillian beginnings, success as a child actor, parts on radio plays and in movie musicals. He made his professional debut at age 4, singing with the Coon-Sanders Orchestra in his hometown of Chicago. When he was 13, he began writing songs. He would write hundreds over the course of his career, including the classic "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire ..."); he was just 16 when Harry James made a hit of his song "Lament to Love." Torme was a musical polymath: In addition to singing and writing songs, he was a fine pianist, a hard-swinging drummer in the mold of his longtime friend Buddy Rich and an accomplished arranger who fashioned musical settings for his songs that were as stylish, subtle and gracefully colored as his vocals.

The Great American Songbook -- the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway standards of Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and others -- was Torme's bible, and no singer ever brought those songs to life with a greater combination of dizzying musicianship and dramatic flair. It takes special skill to interpret those standards: They are so highly crafted, there is such artifice and archness in the polish of their lyrics, that only the most extraordinarily sensitive singers have managed to keep them from seeming glib, have peeled back their layers of wordplay, navigated their thickets of inside rhymes and puns, to get at their core of emotional truth. It is perhaps because he was a songwriter himself that Torme did it so well: With miraculous intuition, he always seemed to alight on just the right note, stooping into his lower register at a key moment, soaring into an ethereal, pining croon, unleashing a burst of staccato syllables. He didn't impose as strong a personality on songs as some -- he wasn't a brooding existentialist like Sinatra or Billie Holiday. But if he never reached their blue depths, these singers never communicated joyfulness and sweetness the way Torme did. The buoyant optimism implicit in so many of those standards -- that wonderful, mid-century American attitude, that "whistling down the street in a snap-brim fedora" insouciance -- found its purest expression in Torme's versions of songs like "It Might as Well Be Spring," "It's Delovely," "On the Street Where You Live" and countless others.

Ella Fitzgerald was Torme's only peer as a vocal virtuoso, but there was a chilliness in Fitzgerald's mastery utterly absent in the sunny spaciousness of a Torme performance. His most fanciful vocal flights were always made in the service of the song; his virtuoso flourishes never hardened into tics. We can hear him at his freewheeling best in a 1963 live concert recording of "Mountain Greenery," one of Torme's signature songs. He begins the song ruminatively, accompanied only by piano: "On the first of May, it is moving day," he sings quietly, delicately. But then the introduction ends, and suddenly Torme is tearing through a double-time reading of the song -- 32 bars compressed into less than 30 seconds, disappearing in a blur of jazzy vocal riffing, Torme sounding remarkably like a trumpet. In the second chorus, Torme is still moving at blinding speed, but he has leapt across an octave, singing a tart, angular gloss on the main melody line. The third chorus arrives, the time is halved; but what sounds like a sassy, swinging coda, shot through with bluesy ululations, yields yet again to a double-time explosion of horn-like phrases, Torme racing past the finish line with an almost dissonant, Dizzy Gillespie-esque exclamation point: "Mountain Greeneryyy!" The performance is an archetypal Torme tour de force: a two-minute, 45-second eruption of brain-boggling creativity that never fails to convey the spirit of what is, after all, an ode to the pleasures of shacking up in the countryside.

The last several months have seen the deaths of three of our greatest song stylists: Sinatra, Joe Williams and Betty Carter. Now Torme, every bit the equal of these giants, has joined them. His singing embodied some of the most quintessentially American musical values: geniality, sentimentality, urbanity, improvisatory panache. He bragged that he knew more than 5,000 songs, that he was a living, breathing encyclopedia of American popular music. To our great good fortune, an abridged version of that encyclopedia, in the elegant shape of hundreds of pitch-perfect recordings, survives him.
salon.com | June 12, 1999

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