COMMENTARY: Remembering Mel Torme

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ Mel Torme’s recent death is more than the passing of a magnificent singer and composer. His loss at age 73 is another reminder of the extraordinary musical symbiosis of Jews _ mostly first generation Americans […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Mel Torme’s recent death is more than the passing of a magnificent singer and composer. His loss at age 73 is another reminder of the extraordinary musical symbiosis of Jews _ mostly first generation Americans _ with Broadway and Hollywood which has so decisively shaped our culture.


Ironically, Torme, born in Chicago and a child of Jewish immigrants from Russia, composed the quintessential Yuletide melody,”The Christmas Song,”with its”Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”beginning.

Another Jew, Irving Berlin, who was born in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, came to the United States as a young man. He wrote the holiday classics”White Christmas”and”Easter Parade,”and his”God Bless America”has been called the country’s second national anthem.

Even a partial listing of Jewish composers and their works reveals an incredible outpouring of talent: George Gershwin (“Porgy & Bess”), Jerome Kern (“Show Boat”), Oscar Hammerstein (“Oklahoma”), Stephen Sondheim (“Sunday in the Park with George”), Richard Rodgers (“South Pacific”), Frank Loesser (“Guys and Dolls”), Jule Styne (“Gypsy”), Max Steiner (“Gone With the Wind”), John Kander (“Cabaret”), Yip Harburg (“Brigadoon”), Charles Strouse (“Annie”), Leonard Bernstein (“West Side Story”) and Berlin himself (“Annie Get Your Gun”).

One reason for this explosion of genius was that during the 20th century, the American musical theater moved away from the traditional Viennese operetta style with its frothy waltzes, merry widows and student princes.

Instead, Broadway musicals developed into something authentically American. In such a dynamic period of transition there were few artistic anti-Semitic bastions that excluded Jews _ unlike the top echelons of business and university faculties which were closed to Jews. Happily, the movie studios and the musical stage were different.

In those places talent, not religion mattered, and audiences, many of whom were themselves newcomers to America, cared little whether a composer’s family came over on the Mayflower or was a recent arrival. In such an open environment, Jewish composers were free to use their talents to shape new musical forms as they embraced a 20th century America of many different ethnic, religious and racial communities.

Michael Shapiro, a musicologist and historian, has suggested some reasons for the enduring success of so many Jewish composers. He notes that several composers, including Gershwin, employed the traditional cantorical music of the synagogue in their songs while one of the dominant sounds they integrated into their work was the jazz originating with American blacks.

Like Jews, blacks were a minority group that found most doors of opportunity closed. But musical talent was always noticed and the jazz sound that began in the American South, especially New Orleans, came north and west to places like Memphis, Kansas City and Chicago.


Benny Goodman, another Chicago-born child of Jewish immigrants, was 16 years older than Torme, and in the 1930s Goodman broke new ground, both musically and racially, by including many great black musicians and arrangers in his jazz band. Their names are now legends: Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter and Fletcher Henderson.

Young Torme encountered jazz as a Jewish boy growing up in Chicago and it influenced his personal and professional life. Torme called jazz”our native folk art,”and because of his background and commitment, it is no surprise he and Duke Ellington wrote music together.

Because the bridge of musical interplay between Jews and blacks was two-way, it is not surprising that Ella Fitzgerald’s renditions of songs by Gershwin, Rodgers and other Jewish composers have been hailed as definitive. While there are more than a thousand recorded versions of”The Christmas Song,”Torme always maintained Nat (King) Cole’s 1946 version was not only the first but the best”reading”of the piece.

But Torme’s life and career illustrate something beyond the major impact Jews have had on American popular music. When his kind of singing fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of rock, Torme was forced to perform the new music, which he called”some of the worst dreck (Yiddish for `garbage’) you can imagine.”And it did nothing to resuscitate his career.

In the last two decades of his life, Torme’s career revived when he returned to the music that was always his. Coveted awards and large audiences came to him, and a new generation of young people discovered what the rest of us always knew: Mel Torme, a superb singer since he was 4 years old, was quite simply the very best.

DEA END RUDIN

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