Two of Portland's finest jazz headliners, Mitzi Zilka and Todd Gang, present the Mel Torme Tribute Concert featuring the repertoire and arrangements of his most beloved songs.

 

 

Mel Tormé was a jazz singer who worked at his craft steadily from the '40s to the '90s, primarily in nightclubs and concert halls. In his 1988 autobiography, It Wasn't All Velvet (its title a reference to his nickname, "The Velvet Fog," bestowed upon him by a disc jockey in the '40s to describe his smooth, husky, wide-ranging voice), he mentioned a wish that had he been born ten years earlier, that is, in 1915 rather than 1925 he would have been a contemporary of Frank Sinatra, a full-fledged big-band singer.