Mel Tormé & Peggy Lee - The Old Master Painter (1950)

US Pop Charts No. 9 (07.01.1950) 7 Weeks

Melvin Howard Tormé (September 13, 1925 – June 5, 1999), nicknamed "The Velvet Fog", was an American musician, singer, composer, arranger, drummer, actor, and author. He composed the music for "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire") and co-wrote the lyrics with Bob Wells.
Melvin Howard Tormé was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Jewish Polish immigrant parents, Father William David Torme and Betty or Bertha Torme (nee Grabore) He graduated from Hyde Park High School. A child prodigy, he first performed professionally at age 4 with the Coon-Sanders Orchestra, singing "You're Driving Me Crazy" at Chicago's Blackhawk restaurant.

He played drums in the drum-and-bugle corps at Shakespeare Elementary School. From 1933 to 1941, he acted in the radio programs The Romance of Helen Trent and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. He wrote his first song at 13. Three years later his first published song, "Lament to Love," became a hit for bandleader Harry James.

From 1942 to 1943, he was a member of a band led by Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers. He was the singer, drummer, and also did some arrangements. In 1943, Tormé made his movie debut in Frank Sinatra's first film, the musical Higher and Higher. His appearance in the 1947 film musical Good News made him a teen idol.

In 1944, he formed the vocal quintet Mel Tormé and His Mel-Tones, modeled on Frank Sinatra and The Pied Pipers. The Mel-Tones, which included Les Baxter and Ginny O'Connor, had several hits fronting Artie Shaw's band and on their own, including Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love?" The Mel-Tones were among the first jazz-influenced vocal groups, blazing a path later followed by The Hi-Lo's, The Four Freshmen, and The Manhattan Transfer.
Tormé works with the most beautiful voice a man is allowed to have, and he combines it with a flawless sense of pitch... As an improviser he shames all but two or three other scat singers and quite a few horn players as well.
— Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing

Tormé was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1946, and soon returned to a life of radio, television, movies, and music. In 1947, he started a solo singing career. His appearances at New York's Copacabana led local disc jockey Fred Robbins to give him the nickname "The Velvet Fog" in honor of his high tenor and smooth vocal style. Tormé detested the nickname. He self-deprecatingly referred to it as "this Velvet Frog voice"] As a solo singer, he recorded several romantic hits for Decca and with the Artie Shaw Orchestra for Musicraft (1946–1948). In 1949, he moved to Capitol, where his first record, "Careless Hands," became his only number-one hit. His versions of "Again" and "Blue Moon" became signature songs. His composition California Suite, prompted by Gordon Jenkins's "Manhattan Tower," became Capitol's first 12-inch LP album. Around this time, he helped pioneer cool jazz.

Norma Deloris Egstrom (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002), known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress, over a career spanning six decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, Lee created a sophisticated persona, writing music for films, acting, and recording conceptual record albums combining poetry and music.
Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, on May 26, 1920, the seventh of the eight children of Selma Amelia (née Anderson) Egstrom and Marvin Olof Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad. Her family and she were Lutherans.[1] Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. After her mother died when Lee was four, her father married Minnie Schaumberg Wiese.

station in North Dakota), changed her name to Peggy Lee. Lee left home and traveled to Los Angeles at the age of 17.

She returned to North Dakota for a tonsillectomy, and was later noticed by hotel owner Frank Bering while working at the Doll House in Palm Springs, California. Here, she developed her trademark sultry purr, having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume. Bering offered her a gig at the Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel East in Chicago. There, she was noticed by bandleader Benny Goodman. According to Lee, "Benny's then-fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into the Buttery, and she was very impressed. So the next evening, she brought Benny in, because they were looking for a replacement for Helen Forrest. And although I didn't know, I was it. He was looking at me strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking. I thought that he didn't like me at first, but it just was that he was preoccupied with what he was hearing." She joined his band in 1941 and stayed for two years.