Mel Tormé started as a kid actor and drummer in Chicago, and you can hear both of those backgrounds in how he sang. There's a rhythmic precision to his phrasing that most vocalists don't have, like he's hearing the drum chart in his head even when he's just standing at a microphone. He co-wrote 'The Christmas Song' when he was barely twenty, which is the kind of fact that sounds made up until you remember people really were that talented that young in the 1940s.

The nickname 'Velvet Fog' followed him his whole career, and he reportedly hated it a little, because it made people think of him as some kind of lounge crooner when he was actually one of the most technically gifted scat singers jazz ever produced. Listen to him trade lines with a horn section and you'll hear someone who thinks like an instrumentalist, not a singer trying to sound like one. His pitch was exact, his time was exact, and he never oversold a note — which in a genre full of belters made him stand out by doing less.

The records with arranger Marty Paich in the late 1950s and into Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley (1960) are the place to start if you want to hear what he actually sounds like at his best — tight little big-band charts, Tormé gliding over the top of them without ever seeming to work hard. Later he found a second life pairing with pianist George Shearing on a run of intimate duo albums in the 1980s, trading the big-band muscle for something quieter and more conversational, which suited his voice just as well.

He never had the cultural reach of a Frank Sinatra or the universal love people have for Ella Fitzgerald, and he knew it — he spent years doing television and acting work because the singing career alone didn't always pay the bills the way it should have. But musicians always knew what he could do. Ask a jazz singer today who they study for technique, and Tormé's name comes up fast, usually followed by someone admitting they still can't quite do what he did.