Songs For Any Taste Mel Torme

• 1It's All Right With Me04:28
• 2Manhattan03:16
• 3Taking A Chance On Love01:59
• 4Home By The Sea01:53
• 5I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'03:14
• 6It's De Lovely02:44
• 7Tenderly02:20
• 8I Wish I Were In Love Again02:31
• 9Autumn Leaves01:32
• 10Nobody's Heart02:31
• Total Runtime26:28

Info zu Songs For Any Taste

„Mel Tormé recorded a number of lovely albums for Bethlehem during the '50s, including It's a Blue World and Sings Fred Astaire. Consisting of a few studio sides interspersed with material recorded live at the Crescendo in February of 1957, Songs for Any Taste finds Tormé asserting himself with confidence and style.

Pianist/leader Marty Paich offers beautifully understated arrangements, featuring trumpeter Don Fagerquist and accordion player Larry Bunker. The set is heavy with lesser-known standards from Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and the Gershwins. Tormé begins the set with a 'French' version of 'Autumn Leaves,' complete with a fake accent that serves to warm up the audience. 'I Wish I Were in Love Again' and 'It's Delovely' are two upbeat knockouts, while 'Tenderly' proceeds at a more languorous pace. The background singing and formal arrangements of 'I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'' mark it as a studio track, but quality-wise, it fits in well with the other material.

The quiet 'Nobody's Heart' closes the set, a moody late-night piece with piano accompaniment. This is a beautiful set, with great songs, in-between chatter, and sympathetic backing.“ (Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.)

Mel Tormé, vocals
Larry Bunker, accordion, vibraphone, bongos
Don Fagerquist, trumpet
Howard McGhee, trumpet
Marty Paich, piano
Ralph Sharon, piano
Mel Lewis, drums
Stan Levey, drums
Pat Moran Quartet, background vocals

Recorded at the Crescendo Club, Los Angeles, California in 1957

Digitally remastered

Mel Tormé
(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.

Melvin Howard Tormé got his start as a child entertainer who sang in nightclubs and on the radio in his native Chicago; he also learned to play piano, drums, and compose. His career as composer took off shortly before he got his first big break as a singer: Harry James recorded his "Lament to Love" (when Tormé was fifteen), and the next year comedian Chico Marx and impresario Ben Pollack hired Tormé as boy singer for the big band they were forming. In 1943, the young star made his first of many film appearances in Higher and Higher, and shortly after that he introduced his own vocal group, the Mel-Tones. Easily the most musical jazz-pop singing unit of the 1940s, the group specialized in ingenious harmonies, witty song juxtapositions, and relentless swing, all of which soon became trademarks of Tormé’s solo work.

When Tormé disbanded the Mel-Tones for a career as a solo singer, he was, for a time, packaged as a crooning rival to Frank Sinatra, nicknamed the Velvet Fog. However, by the turn of the 1950s, Tormé had decided the pop star’s life wasn’t for him. He longed to control his own musical destiny, and launched a series of now-classic jazz vocal albums for such concerns as Coral and Verve Records. These discs covered the entire spectrum of jazz and classic pop, celebrating the Swing Era (Musical Sounds Are the Best Songs and I Dig the Duke/I Dig the Count), the great songwriters (My Kind of Music), show music both contemporary (Broadway, Right Now!) and classic (Swings Shubert Alley), a live album ("Live" at the CrescendoWith the Marty Paich Dek-tette ), a collection of ballads (Tormé), a reunion of the Mel-Tones (Back in Town), a Latin album (Olé Tormé), and even a collection of songs about the moon (Swingin’ on the Moon). Tormé’s usual collaborator was the brilliant orchestrator Marty Paich, about whom he said, "I immediately knew where he was coming from and I understood that he was a complete arranger, not just a jazz arranger."

Tormé is so inimitable that no one has tried to flat-out copy him, but any number of younger artists have learned plenty from him, particularly Betty Carter, Mark Murphy, Cassandra Wilson, Bobby McFerrin, and Kurt Elling. The late Steve Allen said: "Since nobody else has ever had that sound, there was no point in trying to sound like Mel Tormé. But, as I’ve often said, Mel could, literally, give singing lessons to all the other good singers." (Will Friedwald, Excerpted from: Mel Torme’s Finest Hour): Source: Verve.

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