In a continuing smorgasbord of musical riches, Pepperdine University’s Smothers Theatre begins the New Year with two very different performers. Steve March Tormé, son of the singer known as “The Velvet Fog,” presents his touring show titled “Tormé Sings Tormé” on Friday at 8 p.m., an evening of the jazz-oriented songs for which his father, Mel Tormé, became famous. The next evening, on Saturday, New Age pianist George Winston will perform.
The son of Mel Tormé and his first wife, Candy Toxton, the younger Tormé grew up in New York with mother and stepfather, Hal March of television’s “The $64,000 Question.”
“I started singing when I was about 13,” Tormé said, “but I was totally into pop music. My influences were Daryl Hall … Todd Rundgren and The Beatles.”
His early years were spent in pop and rock groups that toured the country, and he befriended the children of other famous performers like Desi Arnaz Jr. and Liza Minnelli, with whom he released a dance album in the seventies.
But Tormé could not fully stray from his jazz roots and before long he was playing clubs crooning some of the songs his father had immortalized, even teaming up with him on duets. The elder Tormé dismissed rock music as “three-chord manure” and urged his son to expand his vocal style.
“The best advice my dad ever gave me,” Tormé said, “was to develop my lower register. I was listening to Michael McDonald [of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan] and everything was sung high. Dad’s musical integrity wouldn’t let him do pop music and I became a jazz singer.”
His jazz leanings initially “hurt me in my 30s,” Tormé said. “But, I am able to bring some fresh perspective to big band jazz now.” In “Tormé Sings Tormé,” the son pays tribute to his father, with his phrasing and scatting remarkably like that of the jazz legend.
Noting that there seems to be no memorable male jazz singers right now, Tormé laughingly referred to himself as a dinosaur.
“Ninety-nine percent of my audiences have never heard of me, so I have to go out and show them.”
Show them he does and his current touring gig includes a 10-piece orchestra led by musical director Steve Rawlins and original arrangements by Tormé Sr. and the celebrated Marty Paich, his father’s former bandleader. But the younger Tormé has loftier ambitions.
“I’m working on a show orchestrated for a 70-piece band,” he said. “It covers Gershwin to ‘West Side Story’ to Stevie Wonder. But, in the end, I’m really just a romantic singer. At my shows, couples end up holding hands again.”
Beyond genres
“New Age?” Winston questions. “When you categorize someone, doesn’t that just tell you what someone is not?”
Winston’s 1980 release “Autumn” (a recording which he calls “Christmas carols for Halloween,”) was the best-selling record in the Windham Hill catalogue for years and won him a Grammy for “Best New Age Album” in 1996. But he insisted there are no genres when it comes to his music. “There is just the sound.”
Winston said blues and slack-key guitar have been as influential in his work as R&B.
“But it’s all just one big soup,” he said. “What’s jazz? What’s rural folk piano? What’s real is playing a song for somebody. I don’t think Pluto cares whether we call it a planet or not.”
Winston has just released a CD on Dancing Cat Records called “Gulf Coast Blues & Impressions-A Hurricane Relief Benefit,” inspired by his love of New Orleans music and a desire to support the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Featuring several of his own compositions, he brings in the flavor of renowned Big Easy pianists like Allen Toussaint and Dr. John.
“I grew up into instrumental R&B and rock in the late ’50s and early ’60s … guys like King Curtis, Sam Cooke and Ray Charles. But I studied New Orleans piano since 1979,” Winston said.
Saying that “I willed this album into being,” Winston said he wanted to put out “Gulf Coast Blues” within a week of the August 2005 hurricane that devastated the region.
It took a bit longer, but the result is a tribute to traditional New Orleans music, and proceeds from CD sales and concerts go to helping people from the Gulf Coast return and rebuild. In keeping with the idea that “every musician is his own genre,” Winston leaves room for improvisation and personal interpretation.
“A human being isn’t a CD player,” he said. “I play a song differently each time I sit down. It’s a fantastic planet of music!”
To accompany the charitable tone of his new release, Winston suggests audience members bring a donation of canned food to the concert, which will be distributed through the Malibu Community Labor Exchange to provide emergency assistance to families in need.
Tickets for both concerts can be obtained by calling the Smothers Theatre box office at 310.506.4522.