Mel on Louis

So I'm on a Mel Torme jag. Sue me.

I'm reading his book My Singing Teachers: Reflections on Singing Popular Music (Oxford University Press, no less, 1994), which includes this anecdote about Louis Armstrong:

I got to know Louis over the years and found him to be a warmhearted, loving man. He had a great pride in himself and his accomplishments, particularly his role as unofficial goodwill ambassador from America to the world.

He had a great sense of humor, sometimes biting, sometimes self-deprecating. I remember once, when I was playing the Paramount theater in New York, he came bounding up the stairs to say hello to some musicians on the floor above my dressing room. I yelled at him: “Hey Louis, what's happening?”

He bounced back into my doorway, grinned that Chinese grin of his, and said: “White folks still in the lead.”

Next book in the stack: Terry Teachout's Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

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[Photo of Armstrong from 1946 by William P. Gottlieb from the Gottlieb Collection at the Library of Congress Flickr Feed.]

Crushing the Velvet Frog

A publicist dubbed Mel Torme "The Velvet Fog" sometime in the late 1940s for the singer's signature smooth style. Torme hated the nickname, but it clung to him like ivy, as the poet once said, like a slug to a garden path, like toilet paper to a shoe, like a dryer sheet to a polyester pantsuit.

Torme would later joke about his "velvet frog voice." So it's hard to tell whether some drudge toiling away deep in the bowels of Amazon.com picked up on Mel's joke (see screen capture above). Or was just being sloppy. Probably the latter (although that person did go to the trouble of adding a diacritical mark to the final vowel of "Torme" up in the title tag, even if it is pointed in the wrong direction. But I obsess, and digress.)

According to my sources at the retail behemoth, this "bug" has been noted in the system and should one day soon be corrected. But maybe it would make Mel's ghost happier to let his joke stand. He does seem to have come to terms with the moniker, later titling his 1988 autobiography It Wasn't All Velvet.

Whether the Velvet is Foggy or Froggy, “The Very Best of Mel Torme” is an amazing deal. Fifty songs by one of the greatest vocalists who ever lived (and if his autobiography is remotely accurate, boy, did he ever live), working some of the best arrangers of the 20th century, all for $6.99. Smooth, man, real smooth.

Recommended reading:
"Mel Tormé and the Marty Paich Dek-tette" by Thomas Cunniffe

(Special thanks to Queenie Sunshine for the dryer sheet simile.)

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UPDATE: The bug report was entered on 31 January. As of 8 Feb, the page is still froggy.