Topic: Mel Torme'
Melvin Howard Tormé (September 13, 1925 – June 5, 1999), nicknamed The Velvet Fog, was an American musician, known as one of the great jazz singers.Tormé was born in Chicago, Illinois to immigrant Russian Jewish parents whose name had been Torma. A child prodigy, he first sang professionally at 4 with the Coon-Sanders Orchestra, singing "You're Driving Me Crazy," at Chicago's Blackhawk restaurant. Between 1933 and 1941, he acted in the network radio serials The Romance of Helen Trent and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. He wrote his first song at 13 and three years later, his first published song, "Lament to Love," became a hit recording for Harry James. He played drums in Chicago's Shakespeare Elementary School drum and bugle corps in his early teens.
![](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_VIPJRnzy4wo/SMuodewUF9I/AAAAAAAABgw/ThLrJj-sAXY/s200/_361952_torme300.jpg)
While a teenager, he sang, arranged, and played drums in a band led by Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers. His formal education ended in 1944, with his graduation from Chicago's Hyde Park High School.
MEL TORME'
Topic: Mel Torme'
![](melt.jpg)
Inevitably, and a bit ironically, Mel Torme has been remembered as "The Velvet Fog," a sobriquet a disk jockey gave him in 1946 that he spent much of the rest of his life trying to shake. Mel Torme (1925?99) was easily the greatest of all scat singers this side of Ella Fitzgerald. At the same time, he amounted to one of the finest dramatic interpreters of the great American popular song to emerge after Frank Sinatra. No other singer can embody the tenderest poetry of Cole Porter or Ira Gershwin one minute and then, one song later, ditch the words altogether to fly off into the scatosphere
...LINK to complete BIOGRAPHY.